Hendricks is included in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,” which examines how 66 artists addressed the civil rights struggle in their work.
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. His portraiture works infuses a certain romanticism into realistic depictions of contemporary black people. Dignified and fashionable, his subjects aren’t generic types but recognizable human beings.
1. Lawdy Mama (1969) embodies the “black is beautiful” mantra by conferring the awe and reverence once accorded Christian altarpieces on the figure of a beautiful woman crowned with a large, halo-like Afro. Inspired by gilded Greek and Russian icons as well as Renaissance altarpieces he encountered during a 1966 trip to Europe, Hendricks applied metallic gold leaf to a shaped canvas, effectively enshrining his subject.
9. Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people—Bobby Seale), 1969.
Barkley Hendricks (b. 1945)
Noir, 1978.
Oil and acrylic on canvas; 72 x 48 inches.
