Best known for his life-sized portraits of ordinary people living in his urban northeast community of Connecticut, Barkley L. Hendricks’s bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common man and woman to celebrity status. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contempor... Read more
Best known for his life-sized portraits of ordinary people living in his urban northeast community of Connecticut, Barkley L. Hendricks’s bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common man and woman to celebrity status. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is the first painting retrospective of the American artist, and includes over 50 works from 1964 to the present. For CAMH’s presentation, a series of photographic works by the artist from a correlated exhibition, Walkin’ with Walker: Narrative Photography of Barkley L. Hendricks, will be included. Spanning four decades of work, Walkin’ with Walker was organized by The African American Museum in Philadelphia and co-curated by Barkley L. Hendricks and Richard J. Watson, curator of exhibitions.
Hendricks’s stylistic renderings connect the art movements of American realism and post-modernism while touching upon many of the art movements of the 1960s and 70s—pop art, photorealism, minimalism, even black aesthetic nationalism. His work occupies a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks’s artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today’s younger generation of artists.
“Hendricks is a sophisticated practitioner who combines impressive references, forms, and techniques in renderings that seem to cut to the core, to reveal his subjects as vulnerable individuals even as they self-consciously pose in displays of hipness,” says Janet Koplos (as reviewed in Art in America, November 2008).
