Hendricks Goes National

Barkley L. Hendricks, New London's own nationally-recognized contemporary American painter-known for his pioneering contributions to African-American portraiture and conceptualism-received the College Art Association's 2010 Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work on Feb. 10 at the association's annual conference in Chicago.

The national award, first presented in 1988, is given to an artist for exceptional work through exhibitions, presentations, or performances. Recent winners have included Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

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

Hendricks, born in 1945 in Philadelphia, earned his certificate at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Yale University. A New London resident since 1972, he is an art professor at Connecticut College, where he's taught for the past 38 years while producing a prolific body of work, which has been exhibited in public institutions throughout the U.S.

"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," says Robert Baldwin, Connecticut College associate professor of art
history.

A major exhibition of the artist's work titled "Barkley Hendricks: The Birth of the Cool" is touring the U.S. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina, the exhibition features more than 50 paintings, dating from 1964 to the present, that reflect Hendricks's unique melding of American realism, pop culture, and post-modernism, and includes his life-sized portraits of people of color, as well as landscapes.

The exhibition has traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California, is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and will conclude this spring at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Texas). Unfortunately for us, Connecticut isn't included on the tour.

In describing his art, Hendricks says, "My work has a focus on figurative painting. The landscapes are more recent, but I started out as a landscape painter. I used to paint in the streets and parks of the city of Philadelphia. One day, my easel blew over and it messed me up...and I didn't go outside for 20 years [until] I was introduced to the warmth and beauty of the Caribbean. I've been going to St. Kitts, Curacao, and Jamaica for the last 20 years where I paint landscapes en plein air-right on the spot."

In response to his work being an in-depth exploration of black identity that has captured an era, a time when so few people of color were represented in portraiture, Hendricks replies, "Unfortunately the culture has been one that has omitted imagery of black people-biased, prejudiced, and ignorant-the stuff that goes on with
racism and bigotry."

He points out that a large area of art focuses on the human figure.

"The modernist direction took off and dealt with other focuses, but all in all the figure is always more of a contact, an inviting bit of subject matter," he says. "And there is a cultural direction that's always been a part of the white Western world, always very focused on itself.

"That wasn't necessarily my neighborhood, so to speak," he continues. "My art deals with my cultural environment, which was very rich, and my focus and attraction to the music-jazz and blues-and the artists that were a product of that time and that were my soundtrack."

Hendricks says his subjects have been "friends, family, people that I met on the streets and became acquainted with and allowed me to photograph them-and when they had time, they would pose."

He works in acrylic and oils with glazes, creating in his portraits a sense of floating silhouettes.

"Using oil and acrylic together gives a wet/dry effect," he says. "The acrylic is quicker drying, the oil takes a little longer-and then I put a glaze or varnish over the oil, which creates contrast."

As an art professor, Hendricks says, "I try to be the best professor, the best teacher I can be, dealing with students with limited experience with art and those who may have a little more, working within the time constraints the institution puts before me."

When asked if it's been difficult to pursue and stay true to his own artistic vision all these years in a competitive and fickle art world, Hendricks replies, "I have a job. It's not something that has impaired me from making a living so far."

For more information and to view more images from "Barkley Hendricks: The Birth of the Cool," visit http://nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions_hendricks.php.