Honoring Hendricks

Artist Barkley L. Hendricks is being honored for his life's work by the College Art Association.

Hendricks, a professor of studio art at Connecticut College, will be given the 2010 Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work at the association's annual conference on Feb. 10.

The Artist Award has recently been given to Yoko Ono, Betye Saar and Krzysztof Wodiczko. It was first handed out in 1988. It's a peer award given to an artist for exceptional work through exhibitions, presentations or performances.

Announcing Hendricks as the winner of this national award, the College Art Association said that his work "transformed how African Americans saw themselves, and how they were seen."

Robert Baldwin, associate professor of art history at Connecticut College, said, "This prestigious national award caps a decade of exhibitions discovering the art of Professor Hendricks and giving him the national reputation he has long deserved. More than most modern artists, Hendricks has pursued his own vision, regardless of what was selling in fashionable galleries."

A major retrospective, "Barkley Hendricks: The Birth of the Cool," is currently touring the United States, opening this weekend at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. The show features more than 50 paintings, including Hendricks' life-sized portraits of people of color.

In a review of the retrospective for the Philadelphia Sunday Tribune, Bobbi Booker wrote, "Hendricks' images are empowering and sometimes confrontational as they explore the complexity of Black identity. ... Hendricks' pioneering contributions to African-American portraiture and conceptualism melds American realism, pop culture and post-modernism in a way uniquely his own."

Hendricks has said that he has always loved art, but he noticed at an early age the people depicted in the famous paintings in museums didn't look like him.

"I was inspired by the masters and how they painted, but there was an absence of people I could recognize," he said. "There is logic to an artist's direction, which is to relate to what they know, and that is what I do."

Hendricks, who lives in New London, will travel to Chicago Feb. 10 to accept the award at the College Art Association's annual conference.