Barkley hendricks victory at 23
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Barkley L. Hendricks (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1945; d. New Haven, CT, 2017) was an American painter and photographer who revolutionized portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world, including travels to Jamaica, his hometown of Philadelphia, and Connecticut where he last lived and worked. He applied intense focus to his subjects while painting, allowing him to capture their unique personalities. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabits an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.
While the directness of his subjects’ gaze could be piercing, Hendricks invoked humor through the titling of his pieces, mitigating the gravity of the message and allowing for an opening into the work.&nbs
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Barkley L. Hendricks
American painter
Barkley L. Hendricks (April 16, 1945 – April 18, 2017) was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career (from photography to landscape painting), Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.[1]
Early life
Born on April 16, 1945, in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Tioga, Barkley Leonnard Hendricks was the eldest surviving child of Ruby Powell Hendricks and Barkley Herbert Hendricks. His parents moved to Philadelphia from Halifax County, Virginia, during the Great Migration when large numbers of African-Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States. Hendricks attended Simon Gratz High School and graduated in 1963. He attended Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).[3] After graduating from PAFA in 1967, Hendricks decided to enlist in the New Jersey National Guard and found work as an arts and crafts teacher
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One of the most influential artists to have emerged in the late 20th century, Barkley L. Hendricks revolutionized portrait painting with his post-modern depictions of cool, stylish and self-aware black subjects. Produced mostly between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, his vivid, precise paintings and photographs of everyday black Americans liberated the black body from a white-centered gaze, with subjects gifted with an unprecedented degree of regality, autonomy and self-assertiveness. Hendricks technical brilliance, evident in his sensitivity to color and his meticulously crafted style, capture the nuances of darker skin tones and the textured articles of clothing that drape his statuesque figures, pictured against radiating monochromatic backgrounds.
Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hendricks attended Yale University, earning both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Fine Art in 1972. Soon after he began teaching studio art at Connecticut College where he continued to teach until his retirement in 2010. During the mid-1960s, Hendricks experienced an important artis
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