CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/15/2025

Heart, humor and humanity in ‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid!’

Now through February 22, the work of Barkley L. Hendricks is on view at Jack Shainman gallery (with a corresponding "Space is the Place" playlist from Soul Jazz on Spotify), so we're acknowledging one of our favorite artists and a Black History Month staff pick with this powerfully positive portrait from Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! Titled "Have You Met Ms. Jones" (1979), the painting is referenced in editor Zoé Whitley’s essay, “For the Love of You: Barkley L. Hendricks’s Reasons for Painting.” In it, Whitley cites Toni Morrison’s noted 2019 essay on “The Source of Self-Regard” in Black culture, which Morrison traced in music, lyrics, “the literature, the language, the custom, the posture…” and other evolutions in how “the possibility of personal freedom, and interior imaginative freedom […] could be engaged.” “Like Morrison,” Whitley concludes, “Barkley L. Hendricks took in all of these aspects and translated physical bodies into a body of work too often reduced to cool surfaces, but in reality teeming with heart, humor and humanity.”