Barkley L. Hendricks: Five Things to Know

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) painted his Black friends and acquaintances with style, flair and power—filling a gap on museum walls.

Hendricks fell in love with portraits by Rembrandt, Manet and Velázquez while traveling in Europe in the mid 1960s but was troubled by the lack of paintings of Black people hanging in museums.

He was a photographer before he took up painting and typically used an image as the starting point of his carefully observed, often full-length portraits.

Making history: he became the first Black artist to have a solo show at New York’s Frick Collection when his work hung alongside European Old Masters in 2023.

Record sale: Yocks (1975), a double portrait, set a new auction record for the artist when it fetched $8.38m at Sotheby's in November 2023.

Don’t call him an activist-artist: “I was only political because, in the 1960s, America was fucked up and didn’t see what some artists or what Black artists were doing,” he told Brooklyn Rail.

To find out more, see Hendrick's full profile on HENI News.