The show received critical acclaim, including the response of the prominent art critic, Hilton Kramer, whose review focused largely on Hendricks' work. In 1977, Hendricks' work appeared in the exhibition, “Four Young Realists,” at ACA Gallery in New York City. In 1974, Hendricks painted What’s Going On, one of his best-known portraits, named after Marvin Gaye's single What's Going On. In the 1970s, he produced a series of portraits of young black men, usually placed against monochromatic backdrops, that captured their self-assurance and confident sense of style. Hendricks said the portraits were about people he knew, and were only political because of the culture of the time. In 1969, he painted one of his first portraits, Lawdy Mama, which depicts a young woman (his second cousin) in the style of a Byzantine icon with gold leaf surrounding her modernly-dressed figure and Angela Davis style afro on an arched canvas. Hendricks even stood alongside his subjects and featured himself in works. Although Hendricks did not pose his subjects as celebrities, victims, or protesters, the subjects depicted in his works were often the voices of under-represented Black people of the 1960s and 1970s. Hendricks' work is considered unique in its marriage of American realism and post-modernism. He frequently painted Black Americans against monochrome interpretations of urban northeastern American backdrops. In these portraits, he attempted to imbue a proud, dignified presence upon his subjects. As the Black Power movement gained momentum, Hendricks set about to change what he saw in Europe by correcting the balance, in life-size portraits of friends, relatives and strangers, encountered on the street, that communicated a new assertiveness and pride among Black Americans. In his visits to the museums and churches of Britain, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, he found his own race was absent from Western art, leaving a void that troubled him. In the mid-1960s while touring Europe, he fell in love with the portrait style of artists like van Dyck and Velázquez. Hendricks was Professor of Studio Art at Connecticut College, where he taught drawing, illustration, oil and watercolor painting, and photography, from 1972 until his retirement in 2010, when he became Professor Emeritus. At Yale, he studied with Bernard Chaet, Lester Johnson, Gabor Peterdi, Robert Reed, and the photographer Walker Evans. In 1970, he began attending Yale University and graduated in 1972 with both a bachelor's and master's degree. After graduating from PAFA in 1967, Hendricks decided to enlist in the New Jersey National Guard and found work as an arts and crafts teacher with the Philadelphia Department of Recreation. He attended Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Hendricks attended Simon Gratz High School and graduated in 1963. His parents moved to Philadelphia from Halifax County, Virginia, during the Great Migration when large numbers of African-Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States. Early life īorn on April 16, 1945, in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Tioga, Barkley Leonnard Hendricks was the eldest surviving child of Ruby Powell Hendricks and Barkley Herbert Hendricks. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career (from photography to landscape painting), Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans. Hendricks (Ap– April 18, 2017) was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism.
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