Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool

The Nasher Museum presented the first career retrospective of American artist Barkley L. Hendricks’ paintings, an exhibition featured on the cover of Artforum magazine and highlighted in Vogue magazine’s “The Vogue 25” cultural highlights of 2008.

Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool opened at the Nasher Museum and traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

The Nasher Museum presents the second hardcover reissue of Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, the exhibition catalogue published by the Nasher Museum on the occasion of the artist’s 2008 painting retrospective. This richly illustrated book was edited by curator Trevor Schoonmaker, who wrote the introductory essay, and includes contributions from Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The catalogue is distributed by Duke University Press. (Note: Please select “cloth” rather than “paperback” to purchase the book.) The hardcover reprint newly includes an in memoriam text and photographs by the artist, who passed away in 2017.

Hendricks is best known for his life-size portraits of people of color from the urban Northeast; he elevates the common and overlooked person to celebrity status with bold portrayals of his subjects’ attitude and style. The exhibition included 57 paintings from 1964 to the present.

Hendricks was born in Philadelphia in 1945, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from Yale University. He is professor emeritus of studio art at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., where he taught from 1972 until he retired in 2010. He passed away in 2017.

Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum, organized the show and edited the 140-page catalogue.

The Nasher Museum’s collection has grown to include three paintings and three photographs by Hendricks.

The 2008 exhibition and related programs were sponsored in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and the North Carolina Arts Council with funding from the State of North Carolina.