‘He Was Constantly Creating’: Little-Seen Barkley Hendricks Photos Get a New York Showcase

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.

An artist of wide-ranging interests, he captured urban street style, American symbols, and musical greats—all with a unique passion.

The artist Barkley L. Hendricks was known during his lifetime, though not nearly well enough, for his swaggering portrait paintings. During travels in Europe as a young man, Hendricks had been struck by the absence of Black folks like him in the works of the Old Masters he admired. In paintings like “Lawdy Mama” (1969), showing a woman with a voluminous Afro against a gold-leaf, Byzantine-style background, Hendricks sought to redress this historical omission and make icons for a new era.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Myself When I Am Real, an exhibition featuring renowned artist Barkley L. Hendricks’ photographic work. The exhibition includes both vintage prints and works produced from the artist’s archive, which the Estate has been cataloging since his passing, and most of which have never been seen publicly. Presented together, these works illustrate the singular way Hendricks perceived the world.

A new show at Jack Shainman Gallery reveals the revered painter's lesser-known creative explorations.

Best known for his iconic paintings of Black figures, Barkley L. Hendricks was also a prolific photographer, something celebrated in the new show Myself When I Am Real at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery. Having received his first camera in the mid-60s, Barkley studied under photojournalist Walker Evans at Yale, an experience that affirmed for him the value of documentary photography. “Just him being a Black photographer and shooting his everyday life — that’s radical,” remarks Elisabeth Sann, director at the gallery.

A new exhibition in New York displays never-before-seen images by Barkley L Hendricks, a renowned American painter whose photography was lesser known – until now.

The late Barkley L Hendricks’ portraits blaze with cool. His subjects talk back at you with flair and brazenness. The gaze behind them is wry, playful, sharp. Hendricks is perhaps best known as a master of painting – as evidenced in his use of oil and gold leaf in Lawdy Mama (1969) and the vibrant figurative abstraction of Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972). But Hendricks captured electrifying images without a paintbrush, too.

Most people know the artist for his paintings gracefully embodying the Black experience in America. In an upcoming exhibition, his photographs take center stage.

Barkley L. Hendricks was known to wear his camera around his neck like an extension of himself. Most people associate the artist with his paintings that gracefully embody the Black experience in America. But in an upcoming exhibition titled Myself When I Am Real, opening at Jack Shainman Gallery on April 13, his photographs will take center stage.

Jack Shainman Gallery will display the late painter’s photographic work, conveying his lighthearted approach to art-making and a glimpse into his immediate world

Barkley L. Hendricks was a pioneer of Black American portraiture—an assertive painter, with a style of his own, bent on depicting friends and strangers alike in life-sized, exacting detail. His subjects stand tall against monochromatic backdrops, dressed in their own clothes. It’s a subversion of the Western canon—culturally of its time, compositionally derived from the old masters—through which ordinary Black people could be foregrounded as subjects, within the gilded halls of fine art.

Barkley L. Hendricks’s 1971 portrait of artist Stanley Whitney is poised to break a record when it comes up for auction in May.

The life-size Stanley pictures its titular subject standing in street clothes against a gold background, smoking a cigarette. It will be offered during a single-owner sale at Christie’s, where it has a low estimate of $5 million. If it reaches that figure, the sale will be a record price for a work by Hendricks, who died in 2017 at the age of 72.

EDWARD HOPPER HOUSE MUSEUM & STUDY CENTER is pleased to present BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: INTIMATE IMPRESSIONS on view from August 4 through October 23, 2022. Curated by Shari Fischberg, Intimate Impressions is organized in conjunction with the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and features eighteen rarely seen or never-before-exhibited landscape paintings created during the artist’s annual winter sojourns to the island of Jamaica.