Birth of the Cool

The artist's first career retrospective highlights some of his best-known paintings including work from 1964 to the present. Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool features a stunning array of bold, life-sized portraits of men and women of color who populate the neighborhoods of urban America.

The renowned artist’s first career retrospective highlights his paintings from 1964 to 2007. While Hendricks has worked in a variety of media throughout his career, and has explored diverse subject matter, he is best known for his striking and provocative life-sized portraits of everyday African-American people from the urban northeast. Bringing to mind American realism, pop culture, and post-modernism in a way uniquely his own, Hendricks’ pioneering contributions to African-American portraiture and conceptualism claims a compelling space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz, and African-American conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. At times cool, at times confrontational, sometimes sexually charged, and always empowering, the work reveals the artist’s keen eye for his subject’s attire, attitude, style, and point of view. Hendricks' groundbreaking body of work has both influenced and paved the way for many of today's generation of artists.

Hendricks calls his camera his “mechanical sketchbook,” as many of his paintings are realized from photographs of people he encountered in daily life.