Books
Barkley L. Hendricks: Basketball
The court, the ball and the hoop: Barkley Hendricks paints basketball.
The third installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery’s five-volume overview of American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) explores the artist’s relationship to basketball, which provided a significant source of artistic inspiration throughout his life.
In his Basketball series, Hendricks applied his keen compositional sense and stylish use of color to depictions of the sport’s essential elements: hoops, nets, backboards and, of course, basketballs themselves. In one painting, the image of a basketball about to make its way into a hoop is repeated twice on a round canvas; on another circular canvas, the iconic black ribs of a basketball are rendered in a bold orange to create a minimalistic yet instantly recognizable pattern.
A study in movement and geometry, Hendricks’ paintings offer a uniquely compelling perspective on the sport as an artistic pursuit. This book’s focus on this aspect of Hendricks’ work allows for a detail-oriented study of the artist’s techniques as a painter.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography
The penultimate installment in Skira’s five-volume Barkley Hendricks survey reveals the artist’s little-known work in photography.
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks’ career, focuses on the artist’s photographic oeuvre. Hendricks credited photography as a key facet of his practice, both as a tool for documenting his own work and as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Influenced by his experiences under Walker Evans’ tutelage at Yale, Hendricks frequently took to the streets to capture the world as he saw it, with his subjects in their element as they lingered in front of stores or performed in jazz clubs. As in his paintings, Hendricks’ attention to graphic composition and ability to capture his subjects’ dynamism are stunning. For the first time, Hendricks’ considerable body of photographic work is collected in a single volume, revealing an essential though under-discussed dimension of his art.
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Barkley L. Hendricks: Landscape Paintings
The little-known Jamaican landscapes of Barkley L. Hendricks, in a handsome, affordable format.
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) was originally a student of landscape painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s, where he also discovered a love for photography. However, it was only in the 1980s that he decided to veer away from making the large figurative paintings that had become his trademark style in favor of outdoor landscape painting. For the next two decades, during vacations to Jamaica, he would dedicate himself to painting views of the country on oval, circular and lunette (half-moon) forms. This publication, which presents for the first time a selection of these landscape works, is enriched with a contribution by art critic, art historian and scholar Barry Schwabsky. It is the second volume in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery’s comprehensive five-volume publication project on Hendricks.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Works on Paper
Paintings of plants and fruit by Barkley L. Hendricks, famed for his postmodern portraiture of Black Americans.
This first installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume publication project on Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) presents for the first time the artist's works on paper. These images—of flowers and plants, bananas, a watermelon, more abstract imagery—sometimes contain puns, or sometimes suggest the inner mechanics of Hendricks's mind and process, but retain the minute attention he paid his subjects, whether human, vegetable, or mineral.
Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume publication project consists of four hardcover volumes, each providing an in-depth exploration of a corpus of works integral to the artist's output—works on paper, landscape paintings, basketball paintings and photography—in addition to a comprehensive 300-page overview. Each volume includes an essay by a leading international scholar.
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Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool
Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool accompanies the first career retrospective of the renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks. Hendricks was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. His unique work contains elements of both American realism and postmodernism, occupying a space between the portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and the pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Hendricks is best known for his life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. His bold portrayal of his subject's attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks' artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists.
This richly illustrated book contains 100 color images of paintings created from 1964 to the present. It focuses primarily on the artist’s full-figure portraits, as well as lesser known early works and the artist's more recent portal-like landscape paintings. The catalog includes the most comprehensive bibliography on Hendricks to date, a timeline of the artist's life, and an interview with the artist by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It also includes essays by Barkley L. Hendricks, Duke University art historian Richard J. Powell, exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection. Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Barkley L. Hendricks: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
In the period of radical change that was 1963–83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to make art that would stand as innovative, original, formally and materially complex, while also making work that reflected their concerns and experience as black Americans?
Soul of a Nation surveys this crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of 20th-century black artists, including Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Charles White and Frank Bowling.
The book features substantial essays from Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, writing on abstraction and figuration, respectively. It also explores the art-historical and social contexts with subjects ranging from black feminism, AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups to the role of museums in the debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement. Over 170 artworks by these and many other artists of the era are illustrated in full color.
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first use of the term “black power” by student activist Stokely Carmichael; it will also be 50 years since the US Supreme Court overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage. At this turning point in the reassessment of African American art history, Soul of a Nation is a vital contribution to this timely subject.