Barkley L. Hendricks

Barkley L. Hendricks (born April 16, 1945, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died April 18, 2017, New London, Connecticut) was an American portrait artist who depicted the lives of ordinary Black men and women in paintings in the style and on the scale of those of the Old Masters, whose work he encountered in Europe as a young man. His bold, experimental works were inspired by popular music, sports, and culture but they were personal, not political. “My paintings were about the people that were part of my life,” he said in a 2016 newspaper interview.

Growing up

Barkley Leonnard Hendricks was born in Philadelphia. His father, who was also named Barkley, worked in construction, while his mother, Ruby Powell Hendricks, worked in the home before becoming a teacher’s aide. Barkley Hendricks was one of five children. He graduated from Simon Gratz High School in Philadelphia in 1963 and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. While studying there, he took the trip that would change his life.

In the mid-1960s, Hendricks traveled to Britain, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, visiting the museums and churches that were home to the works of Paul Cézanne and Rembrandt, among others. He was enthralled by the beauty and complexity of the portraits but was dismayed to see so few Black people depicted in the art. He decided he would do something about that.

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Early career

In 1967, after receiving a certificate from the Academy of the Fine Arts, Hendricks enlisted in the New Jersey National Guard and took a job as an art teacher at the Philadelphia Department of Recreation. Hendricks was a huge basketball fan, and during his time at the rec department he painted a series of works that explored the shapes of the basketball court: the hoop, the key, the ball in motion. One, called Father, Son, and... (1969), is three versions of a backboard and is reminiscent of triptychs (three-panel paintings) first painted in the Middle Ages.

In 1970 Hendricks enrolled in Yale University’s school of art, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts in two years. After his graduation, he began teaching in the department of art at Connecticut College. He retired in 2010.

Always fascinated by photography, he would sometimes snap photographs of people who would later become subjects of his paintings. Woody (1973) depicts a male dancer in yellow, arms stretched wide against a vibrant yellow background. The subject was Woodruff Wilson, a dancer Hendricks knew and photographed at Connecticut College.

Much of Hendricks’s work was painted at the height of the Black Power movement, and art critics sometimes looked for political messages in his depictions. One of his most famous early works, Lawdy Mama (1969), features a woman in an Afro hairstyle and reminds many who see it of Black activist Angela Davis. But true to Hendricks’s commitment to paint the people in his life, the inspiration and model for this work was actually his cousin.

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He was also not afraid to be the subject of his own work. In 1969’s Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People—Bobby Seale), Hendricks is the model for the painting of a man, naked from the waist down and sporting a Superman shirt and sunglasses.

Emerging from obscurity

Despite having his 1970 self-portrait Brown Sugar Vine included in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, for much of his career, Hendricks’s work was not widely celebrated in the art world. That began to change in 2008 when a curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Trevor Schoonmaker, organized a retrospective called “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool.” The traveling exhibition, which featured more than 50 works dating from 1964, was also featured at Harlem’s Studio Museum.

Hendricks continued to his create his unique type of striking portraits—including Fela. Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen... (2002), a stunning depiction of Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, and Roscoe (2016), showing a young Black man sporting a T-shirt with a statement against Fox News Channel—and his work found its place in exhibitions at such prestigious museums as Tate Modern in London. In preparation for the Tate exhibition in 2017, Hendricks told the museum’s curators, “I’m just trying to do the best painting of the individuals who have piqued my curiosity and made me want to paint them.”

Hendricks died of a cerebral hemorrhage before the Tate exhibition opened. In 2023 he became the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York. In the exhibition catalogue, Kehinde Wiley, who painted the lush presidential portrait of Barack Obama in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., said of Hendricks:

• No figurative artist can approach painting without considering Barkley Hendricks.