Painted portrait of a Black man in a long overcoat standing against a plain cream background, with open space beside him.
Barkley L. Hendricks painted ordinary Black people from Philadelphia and New York life-size, in oil, on flat color grounds, giving 1960s and 70s street style the same scale and self-possession Western portraiture once reserved for aristocracy.
He wasn't painting royalty and he wasn't painting saints. He was painting his cousin, his students, guys he saw on the street in a good coat, and he gave every one of them the full formal treatment: life-size scale, oil on canvas, a composition borrowed straight from the European portrait tradition. Strip away the flat background and what's left is the figure alone, fully lit, fully seen, with nothing behind them to explain or excuse their presence.
Hendricks died in 2017. His reputation has only grown since, and painters working right now point to him directly as the reason they paint the way they do.
Who was Barkley L. Hendricks?
Born in Philadelphia in 1945, Hendricks studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1963 to 1967, then traveled through Europe on a 1966 scholarship where he encountered the work of Caravaggio and Diego Velázquez in person, according to the Studio Museum in Harlem's account of his training. He went on to earn BFA and MFA degrees at Yale, studying under the photographer Walker Evans.
From 1972 until his retirement in 2010, he taught studio art at Connecticut College. That's 38 years in one classroom, which is a strange fact to sit next to how radical his early paintings still look. He died on April 18, 2017, in New London, Connecticut, at 72, of a cerebral hemorrhage, according to Culture Type's obituary.
Painting wasn't the first thing he picked up, either. Hendricks started taking photographs at age ten and kept a camera close for the next 62 years, according to Hyperallergic's reporting on his photography. His wife Susan put it plainly after his death: he always said he was a photographer before he was a painter. He called his camera his mechanical sketchbook, a way to gather information faster than he could ever draw it by hand, and the habit fed straight into the paintings. Most of his portraits started as photographs of people he'd spotted on the street or asked to sit for him.
Why do his portraits feel different from earlier Black portraiture?
Because he applied the full weight of European portrait tradition to subjects that tradition was never built to include.
Hendricks studied Renaissance and Baroque painters directly and borrowed their strategy of making a single figure monumental against a plain field. Then he pointed that strategy at people the tradition had no place for: a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and platform shoes, a man in a three-piece suit and sunglasses, someone he passed once on a Harlem street and asked to sit for him. The plain background isn't a shortcut. It's a decision. Nothing competes with the figure for your attention, so the figure has to hold it alone.
That's a harder thing to pull off than it sounds. A flat monochrome ground has nowhere to hide a weak painting.
What role does clothing play in his portraits?
Nearly all of it. Once the background goes flat and plain, clothing becomes the main information a viewer gets, besides the face and the pose.
A wide-brimmed hat, a full-length leather coat, platform shoes, a three-piece suit worn like it was tailored for a throne: none of that is decoration. It's the argument. Hendricks painted the shine on a shoe and the exact drape of a coat with the same care he gave a face, because the clothes were doing real work, signaling exactly who this person had decided to be that day. That's a different use of costume than a royal portrait, where the clothes announce a rank the sitter was simply born into. Here, the clothes announce a choice.
What is Lawdy Mama and why does it matter?
It's one of his earliest and most recognized paintings, and it turns a family member into something closer to an icon.
Painted in 1969 in oil and gold leaf, Lawdy Mama depicts Hendricks's second cousin Kathy Williams, framed by a rounded, arched top that Hendricks built himself, echoing the shape of a Byzantine icon panel. According to the Studio Museum in Harlem, which holds the painting as a gift of Stuart Liebman, the work "imbues the Black feminine form with integrity, while also alluding to Byzantine and medieval religious icons." Her afro reads as a halo against the gold ground. The title comes from a Nina Simone lyric.
Hendricks had just learned to apply gold leaf after his European trip, and he used the technique on a Black sitter in a Philadelphia studio in a year when almost nobody else was doing anything like it. The painting doesn't argue that Kathy Williams deserves reverence. It just paints her as though that were never in question.
What is Icon for My Man Superman about?
A self-portrait, and a very direct joke with a serious point underneath it.
Hendricks made it the same year as Lawdy Mama: himself, wearing a Superman shirt, sunglasses, and little else, in oil, acrylic, and aluminum leaf, in a work titled Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale). The full title does the work the image alone can't. Superman never showed up for Bobby Seale or anyone in Seale's position, so the shirt reads less like an homage and more like a challenge to a fictional hero who never had to earn the label.
It's funny, and it's still pointed fifty years later. That combination is rare. There's a real risk in a joke like this landing as pure irony and nothing else, but Hendricks avoids that by painting himself with total seriousness, the same unflinching realism he'd give any sitter, so the humor sits on top of a technically committed painting instead of replacing one.
What did Hendricks mean by "cool"?
Self-possession under observation. That's the short version.
His subjects don't perform for the viewer. They hold a pose the way a person holds a pose when they already know exactly how they look and don't need your approval to keep looking that way. That's a specific kind of armor, and it comes directly out of the era Hendricks was painting in, when style itself was doing political work. An afro, a leather coat, a pair of platform boots, all of it saying something about who got to define beauty and confidence during the Black Power years. Hendricks painted that confidence at full scale instead of shrinking it into a genre scene.
Cool, in his hands, isn't detachment. It's the opposite. It's total control of how you're seen.
That's also why the clothes and the pose read as political without a single protest sign in the frame. Self-presentation was already a public argument in the late 1960s and 70s, over who got to look confident and who got to take up that much visual space without apologizing for it. Hendricks painted that confidence as a fact, not a demand.
Why did he stop painting portraits for almost twenty years?
He'd simply had enough of being expected to repeat himself.
Around 1984, in a stretch he called the "Ronaissance," a pointed jab at the Reagan years, Hendricks stepped back from portrait painting almost completely. For close to two decades he made landscapes instead, many of them painted on trips to Jamaica, along with a series of basketball paintings and a large, mostly private body of photography, according to the Nasher Museum's own account of his career. Nasher chief curator Trevor Schoonmaker described him as always his own man, defiantly so, someone who stopped painting portraits at exactly the moment everyone wanted more of them.
A single commission changed that. In 2002 he was asked to paint the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, and the project turned into an elaborate mixed-media piece built around found objects, shoes included. That painting reconnected two things he'd been keeping separate, straightforward portraiture and his instinct for assemblage, and it pulled him back into painting people for the rest of his life. He signed with Jack Shainman Gallery soon after and had two major New York gallery shows, in 2013 and 2016, before he died in 2017.
Why did his first retrospective take until 2008?
Because museums weren't paying attention to figurative Black portraiture in real time, and it took decades for that to change.
Birth of the Cool opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University on February 7, 2008, and closed there on July 13. Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, it was, according to the Nasher Museum's own description, "the first career retrospective of American artist Barkley L. Hendricks' paintings," gathering 57 works. It went on to the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Hendricks had been painting at full maturity since the late 1960s. A museum needed until 2008 to give that body of work a proper survey. Almost forty years is a long wait for someone who never stopped showing up to the easel.
Who did Hendricks influence?
Painters working today who you've probably already seen.
Culture Type's obituary names Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas as artists who carried his approach forward, and it's not hard to see why. Wiley's monumental figures against decorative flat backgrounds and Thomas's confident, styled sitters both start from the same premise Hendricks worked from decades earlier. Paint the ordinary Black figure at the same scale and with the same finish as anything else that's ever hung on a museum wall, and give it just as much command of the room.
That influence keeps showing up. Museum surveys of figurative Black portraiture now routinely trace a line back to Hendricks as the painter who proved the approach could carry an entire career, not just one striking image.
Bringing that confidence home
Hendricks never needed a crown or a throne to make a portrait feel important. He needed scale, a steady hand, and a subject who knew exactly who they were.
That's the same idea behind Noirci Studio's collection of African American portraits, originals painted in oil and watercolor, then reproduced on archival giclee canvas and printed to order in the United States. None of it is mass-produced overseas, and the stretched canvas options ship over solid wood, ready to hang.
If it's the sheer confidence of the sitters that stuck with you, the Black excellence collection takes that same self-possession as its whole subject. And if you just want more of what Hendricks was doing, painting Black people as the entire point of the picture, the wider run of wall art African American painters made on their own terms is the place to keep looking.
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Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.