barkley hendricks
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary artist and photographer, known as “the Grandfather of Black Postmodern Portraiture,” who revolutionized the art world during the late 20th century with his Black portraiture.
His works illustrate individuals of Black descent he encountered through travels in and outside of America while exuding quirkiness and African-American pop culture through the subjects.
His pieces, whether paintings or photographs, display ordinary friends, family, and acquaintances of Hendricks in a magisterial and bold way.
On the left: Lawdy Mama, 1969
Barkley Hendricks was born on April 16, 1945, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and received his B.A. and M.A. in fine arts from Yale University.
During his trip around Europe in the mid-1960s, Hendricks came across a variety of European art that transformed his artistry. On his trips to museums and chapels in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, he saw that his Black people were missing from Western art. As the Black Power movement gained traction during this period, Hendricks set out to rectify what he saw in Europe by redressing the balance with life-size pictures of friends, family, and strangers he met on the street, which expressed a new confidence and pride among the Black community. Hendricks was a professor at Connecticut College where he taught Studio Art and retired in 2010 after teaching for 38 years. He passed away in 2017 at 72 in his home in Connecticut.
On the right: Northern Lights, 1976
Although his photographs do not gain as much recognition as his paintings, they still evoke his long-lasting originality and nonconformist personality.
On the left: Untitled, 1978
His subjects usually display directness through a strong gaze, but Hendricks was still able to incorporate his well-known humor and quirkiness into the title of his pieces. Not only are his subjects of Black descent, but they are usually of darker skin tone against monochromatic backgrounds.
On the right: Anthem, 2015
Greatly inspired by European artists such as Rembrandt, Manet, and Velásquez, Hendricks’s approach to American art was to focus on Black individuals while shifting the Euro-centric gaze that dominated the art world during this time.
At the emergence of contemporary art, Hendricks played a vital role in the representation of art and artists of color in modern America through his unique style combining realism, pop art, and neo-Baroque style portraiture.
“And then we would have to talk about the word ‘political’ in this particular culture, in America. Anything a black person does in terms of the figure is put into a ‘political’ category”
Above: What's Going On, 1974