Portraits by Barkley L. Hendricks Will Hang With Old Masters at the Frick
Barkley L. Hendricks’s “Lawdy Mama” (1969) will be displayed as part of a solo show of his work at the Frick Madison.Credit...The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
NEW YORK TIMES
He is the first artist of color to have a solo show at the 87-year-old museum, organized by Aimee Ng and Antwaun Sargent.
The portrait artist Barkley L. Hendricks, who died in 2017, considered the Frick Collection one of his favorite museums. Now Hendricks’s celebratory, large-scale paintings of Black Americans will hang in that institution, long the home of Rembrandt, Bronzino and Van Dyck, as the first artist of color to have a solo show at the 87-year-old Frick.
In the fall of 2023, the museum will intersperse about a dozen of Hendricks’s portraits among its own holdings in an exhibition at its temporary home, Frick Madison. Hendricks made life-size portraits of Black friends, relatives and strangers he encountered on the street — paintings that only recently have been widely recognized by museums and the art market but helped set an assertive tone for figuration and opened the field for many younger artists.
“He was painting in the old master tradition — the quality is great, their visual impact is there,” said Aimee Ng, a curator at the Frick. “We wanted to foreground his paintings as we would treat any historical artist.”