Barkley L. Hendricks

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks’ career, focuses on the artist’s photographic oeuvre. Hendricks credited photography as a key facet of his practice, both as a tool for documenting his own work and as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Influenced by his experiences under Walker Evans’ tutelage at Yale, Hendricks frequently took to the streets to capture the world as he saw it, with his subjects in their element as they lingered in front of stores or performed in jazz clubs. As in his paintings, Hendricks’ attention to graphic composition and ability to capture his subjects’ dynamism are stunning. For the first time, Hendricks’ considerable body of photographic work is collected in a single volume, revealing an essential though underdiscussed dimension of his art.

The third installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery’s five-volume overview of American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) explores the artist’s relationship to basketball, which provided a significant source of artistic inspiration throughout his life.

In his Basketball series, Hendricks applied his keen compositional sense and stylish use of color to depictions of the sport’s essential elements: hoops, nets, backboards and, of course, basketballs themselves. In one painting, the image of a basketball about to make its way into a hoop is repeated twice on a round canvas; on another circular canvas, the iconic black ribs of a basketball are rendered in a bold orange to create a minimalistic yet instantly recognizable pattern.

A study in movement and geometry, Hendricks’ paintings offer a uniquely compelling perspective on the sport as an artistic pursuit. This book’s focus on this aspect of Hendricks’ work allows for a detail-oriented study of the artist’s techniques as a painter.

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) was originally a student of landscape painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s, where he also discovered a love for photography. However, it was only in the 1980s that he decided to veer away from making the large figurative paintings that had become his trademark style in favor of outdoor landscape painting. For the next two decades, during vacations to Jamaica, he would dedicate himself to painting views of the country on oval, circular and lunette (half-moon) forms. This publication, which presents for the first time a selection of these landscape works, is enriched with a contribution by art critic, art historian and scholar Barry Schwabsky. It is the second volume in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery’s comprehensive five-volume publication project on Hendricks.

This first installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume publication project on Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) presents for the first time the artist's works on paper. These images—of flowers and plants, bananas, a watermelon, more abstract imagery—sometimes contain puns, or sometimes suggest the inner mechanics of Hendricks's mind and process, but retain the minute attention he paid his subjects, whether human, vegetable, or mineral.

Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume publication project consists of four hardcover volumes, each providing an in-depth exploration of a corpus of works integral to the artist's output—works on paper, landscape paintings, basketball paintings and photography—in addition to a comprehensive 300-page overview. Each volume includes an essay by a leading international scholar.