Barkley L. Hendricks

About the Author

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) is an artist profoundly integral and pivotal to art and African-American culture. Barkley L. Hendricks was a painter and photographer best known for his realist and post-modern portraits of people of color living in urban areas beginning in the 1960s and 70s and continuing to the present.

Hendricks was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lived and worked in New London, Connecticut. He earned both his BFA and MFA from Yale University and was the subject of a large-scale traveling exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, organized by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2008), which traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008-2009), Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2009), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2009-2010) and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2010).

His work is included in numerous public collections both within the United States and abroad, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Tate Modern, London, UK; Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.Jack Shainman Gallery has represented Hendricks since 2009. His solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery include Heart Hands Eyes Mind (2013), Barkley L. Hendricks (2016) and Them Changes (2018).