Opening Barkley: The Birth of Cool

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Critical Noir: Opening Barkley
by Mark Anthony Neal

Birth of Cool, a retrospective exhibition on the life and work of artist Barkley L. Hendricks recently opened at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Conceived by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum and Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Birth of Cool is the first such retrospective of the Philadelphia native's work. According to Powell, the foremost scholar of Hendricks's work, the idea of a Hendricks retrospective was "beguiling, with the idea to encounter old friends, audacious strangers, and engrossing paintings, it seems, for the very first time." The exhibition's opening night was reflective of Powell's observations bringing together an eclectic group of people for a discussion between Hendricks and Powell, which was followed by an after-party that featured Grammy-award winning producer and DJ 9th Wonder.

Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts and Yale University, Hendricks emerges in the late 1960s just as "Black Power" became synonymous with black vernacular culture via the agitprop of Black Arts Movement figures like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Hendricks was primarily interested in figurative and life sized portraiture, thus his subjects, more often than not, were simply the bodies of everyday black folk. Hendricks's aesthetic commitment to the "folk" likely helped keep him beyond the radar of the mainstream art world. As Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mencil Collection in Houston, "these are black people who are rarely glimpsed outside their community (not art galleries), but within these communities they can easily be seen just as easily as symbols of vibrant everyday life." As such, over the past few decades, Hendricks has helped establish black bodies as sites vernacular culture--his influence seen in the work of younger artists such as Kehinde Wiley and even Iona Rozeal Brown.

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