Fashion and Politics in Barkley L. Hendricks’s Pictures
“Untitled” n.d.
Photographs © Barkley L. Hendricks / Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
An artist of wide-ranging interests, he captured urban street style, American symbols, and musical greats—all with a unique passion.
Barkley L. Hendricks, who died in 2017, was known for his sleek, large-scale paintings of his friends. He was less widely known for the photographs taken in the course of producing those paintings.
Only recently did researchers and family members overseeing his archives begin to organize and dissect this little-studied part of his career. After his death, his widow and Jack Shainman, his longtime New York dealer, worked to select 60 photographs he’d taken and printed between 1965 and 2004. Some of those images, on view in a show at Shainman’s gallery that closes tomorrow, bring Hendricks’s world into focus.