Barkley L. Hendricks retrospective at the Nasher Museum of Art

Thursday, 29 November 2007 23:25

DURHAM, N.C. - “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool,” the first career retrospective of the American artist’s paintings, will be on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University through July 13, 2008. Hendricks’ work connects the art movements of American realism and post-modernism, occupying a space between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper.

Best known for his life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast, Hendricks’ bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common and overlooked person to celebrity status.

“Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool” will include 60 paintings from 1964 to the present. The exhibition will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem in fall 2008, the Santa Monica Museum of Art in spring 2009, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in fall 2009 and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in early 2010. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is the organizer of the show.

“The work of Barkley Hendricks is a wonderful discovery; often elegant and sometimes confrontational, but always stunning” said Kimerly Rorschach, the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum. “We are proud that this unprecedented show of one of America’s most important, yet long overlooked, artists will originate at the Nasher Museum.”

Hendricks was born in Philadelphia in 1945, studied at and received his certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from Yale University. He is a professor of art at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., where he has been teaching since 1972.

Hendricks made his mainsteam museum debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1971 show, “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” and the Studio Museum in Harlem organized his first major solo show in 1980. In 1994, his work was part of the Whitney’s “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” In 2001, a large solo show, “The Barkley L. Hendricks Experience,” was organized by the Lyman Allyn Museum of Art, New London, Conn.

Hendricks’s oil portrait of Fela Kuti was an important new work in the 2003 New Museum exhibition, “Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,” also curated by Schoonmaker. And in 2005, Hendricks’ work was included in “Back to Black – Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary” at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Nasher Museum.

“Barkley Hendricks has always been ahead of his time,” Schoonmaker said. “His work touches upon many of the movements of the ’60s and ’70s – pop art, photorealism, minimalism, black nationalism – but he has always done his own thing and avoided easy categorization. His ground-breaking work is as fresh today as it was 30 and 40 years ago and a generation of young artists is deeply indebted to him.”

The exhibition is composed primarily of full-figure portraits, for which Hendricks has been most recognized, as well as lesser-known early works and the artist’s more recent portal-like paintings of the Jamaican landscape, where he returns annually to paint “en pleine air.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated 250-page color catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, that will include essays from Schoonmaker; Richard J. Powell, Duke’s John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History; Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum; and Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection.

Visit the Nasher Museum of Art at : www.nasher.duke.edu/