Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool

BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: BIRTH OF THE COOL
EXHIBITION TOUR
February 7, 2008 - July 13, 2008: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
November 12 - March 15, 2009: Studio Museum in Harlem
May 16 - August 22, 2009: Santa Monica Museum of Art
October 17 - Jan 3, 2010: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
January 30 - April 18, 2010: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston


Above: © Barkley HendricksFela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, oil and variegated leaf on canvas, handcrafted burned frame and embedded computer camera

Following a recent post on Kehinde Wiley, the man sometimes cited as his artistic progenitor is showing at the Studio Museum, Harlem. From the Nasher Museum website: Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. 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. This unprecedented exhibition of Hendricks's paintings will include work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is organizing the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, will include contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.

Martha Schwendener, wrote in the Village Voice (August 19, 2008):
Wiley, though, isn't even in the first generation of black men to paint the figure. Kerry James Marshall's patchwork compositions are subversive confections of Eisenhower-era vignettes filled with tar-baby black figures and jarring texts. And then there's Barkley Hendricks—in fact, Wiley's paintings are a kind of juiced-up redux of Hendricks, with similar centralized figures and an emphasis on pattern. A recent painting by Hendricks of Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo Kuti showing him as a haloed saint has a yellow-wallpaper background that competes with the figure in the foreground, just as in Wiley's compositions.And despite the surface swagger, Wiley is a much tamer painter than either of these two artists. Marshall's paintings carry titles like Black Power and By Any Means Necessary; Hendricks's subjects range from women with foot-tall Afros and T-shirts that read "Slave" and "Bitch" to Fela, a musician whose 1977 hit album Zombie was an attack on the Nigerian military. (Hendricks's Fela painting shows the musician grabbing his crotch—something that, despite the infamous lewdness of hip-hop, Wiley avoids.)