The Frick Museum in New York City became my favorite art museum when I was 14. It’s not that I had a lot to compare it with — practically none — but the comparisons I could make were to the giants. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., I had seen, thanks to a generous aunt who shared her passion for travel and culture.

The much smaller Frick is a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue with a permanent collection of portraits and other Old Masters paintings. The museum instantly made it clear to a newbie what the art fuss is all about. The paintings radiate. Beauty, personality, emotion, trappings — you don’t need a wall text to get it. All you need are eyes.

The museum’s legacy collection also serves as an example of a gap that current thinkers have tried to describe in terms that have since morphed into political code words. The Frick I learned to love exhibited no portraits of people of color. No minority artists were represented.

Now, with the announcement of a Fall 2023 exhibition of portraits by Barkley L. Hendricks, the Frick will be setting part of the art history record straight. The longtime Connecticut College art professor who lived in New London until his death at age 72 in 2017 has been gaining 21st-century recognition for work he began in the 1970s. In the estimation of the exhibition curators at the Frick, his portraiture compares to that of the greats of the 16th through the 19th centuries.

The vibrancy of Hendricks’ full-length portraits of friends, family and Black kids on the street possess the same masterful radiance, and often a bonus of humor and ’tude. What he learned from the acknowledged masters he used to imbue his own work, and he has in turn inspired others.

The Frick will never be quite the same. It will be better, updated, more honest and more complete.

At the recent debate of three Republicans primarying to contest Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s Senate seat, one of them, Leora Levy, stated that she does not believe that systemic racism exists in the United States. She may think that in misguided sincerity; she is wrong.

At first sight, a white teenager’s reaction to, say, Hans Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, would have been awe at the power and perfection of the painting and its surroundings. Nothing in the context would have prompted her to notice that something or someone might be missing.

For a Black teen, the context would have been inescapable. She might be just as blown away by the portraits but she would notice that, as usual, none of them looked like her.

Omission, whether unintended or deliberate, is systemic racism in its most silent form.

Art always leads, even when it has to endure a long wait for the art establishment to notice. Barkley L. Hendricks’ work has now been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Nasher Museum at Duke University. His reputation will continue to grow as his many works in different media — photography, landscape and works on paper — gain larger audiences.

Let it begin here in his longtime hometown, where his wife, Susan, still lives. There will be another 2023 Hendricks exhibition, this one in the summer at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum (where I serve as a trustee). “Barkley L. Hendricks in New London” will supplement the portraits, photographs and watercolors with oral history from former colleagues about Hendricks’ experience as an African-American faculty member in the predominantly white college community of the 1970s.

This is not the same city, nor the same museum, nor the same college community it was when Barkley Hendricks got his start. He would be glad, I hope, to see that his work of setting the record straight continues.

Lisa McGinley is a member of The Day Editorial Board.