words: alex waxman

images: barkley hendricks COURTESY jack shainmain gallery

In the mid 1970s, the art world began to take notice of a young black figurative painter coming out of Yale named Barkley Hendricks. Hendricks’ high-impact life-sized portraits of striking black individuals, painted with Old Master virtuosity and detail, commanded attention, putting the viewer in what felt like direct contact with his subjects. Today, these portraits are owned by major museums, coveted by collectors, and Hendricks is widely credited with reviving portraiture at a time when it was very much on the sidelines, making him a forefather to the resurgence of black artists working in figuration like Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, and Amy Sherald, to name just a few.

Back then, however, Hendricks’ work couldn’t have been further from what was happening in the art world, where minimalist abstraction was the dominant orthodoxy. Hendricks couldn’t have cared less. Early on at Yale, when the abstract painters attempted to enlist him, Hendricks was quick to let them know he wasn’t interested. Instead, he went to learn from the photographers, including the great American documentarian Walker Evans. In reality, Hendricks was already on his own trajectory, one shaped and set in motion years earlier in his hometown of Philadelphia.

In the mid 1960s, Hendricks was working part-time as a roving art teacher on the playgrounds of North Philly for the Department of Parks and Recreation while training at the classically-oriented Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. The mythic hometown legend Wilt Chamberlain had just returned to the 76ers. Philadelphia’s young black artists were engaged in discussion about what “black art” should be. Hendricks, a local kid from the working-class neighborhood of Nicetown-Tioga, was equally steeped in the academy and the culture of the street. On the playgrounds and basketball courts he knew well, and where he was well-known (by the nickname ‘Butch’), Hendricks found subjects for early portraits. And it was there that he drew inspiration for another body of work, largely overlooked, that he called his Basketball Paintings.

With their playful graphic compositions, elevation of the vernacular to near sacred heights, subtle rendering of light and shadow, and titles freely mixing street culture and high art, the Basketball Paintings are in many ways the spatial counterpart to Hendricks’ arresting portraits. They reveal an artist engaged with the language and ideas of abstraction, while also very much rooted in black life and his community. Hendricks passed away in 2017, but the Basketball Paintings are set to be exhibited for the first time in the spring of 2022 at Jack Shainman Gallery.

In the early 2000s, I was fortunate to study drawing with Hendricks at Connecticut College, where he taught for over 30 years. He was a demanding, if for many of us, bewildering figure, prone to extended monologues on matters obscure to most of us: the tyranny of framers, the semiotics of women’s footwear, racial dynamics in the art world, Reaganism. He was known to wield a laser pointer when addressing an anatomical question of particular concern, or the subtle rendering of drapery. All of this is to say, he was deeply memorable. And while Hendricks was constitutionally unwilling to follow the prescribed rules or prevailing winds of the art world, his influence only seems to grow year after year. As his own words and interviews with those who knew him or fell under the sway of his works attest, the Barkley Hendricks experience is on full view in the long overlooked Basketball Paintings. 

BARKLEY HENDRICKS [Oral History, 2009]: I was the arts and crafts specialist for the Philadelphia Department of Recreation for District 10. I would go around to various playgrounds. There were some places where I did, like, marble tournaments or plaster of Paris molds and stuff like that. But the situation was such where the district chairman recognized that he had a goldmine in me. I worked well with the kids...If the adults didn’t get in the way, we made good stuff.

MOE BROOKER, PHILADELPHIA ARTIST, PEER: That was a job that a number of artists would take. I did the same thing. You’d work from 2 o’clock until 10. It was a good gig. You got money, and you were able to paint on the job if you wanted to.

BARKLEY HENDRICKS [Writings, 2007]: The courts were just barely marked, and the rims never had nets or chains that lasted more than a week or two (that is, if the entire rim was not bent or broken off from the backboard). The street balls rarely had distinguishing lines on them to say, “I’m a basketball.” When the large orange ball was launched from the shooter’s hand, there would follow a confident cry of “Two!” which could often be heard in the next block. At times, which were many, the ball would hit the rim or backboard and soar in directions away from where the game was played. Scrugs, tremblers, and slop were just a few of the names labeling players of dubious skills.

MOE BROOKER: There was a group of us in Philadelphia who were artists who got to know each other. We’d get together from time to time and talk about what the possibilities were in terms of becoming a black artist—what the problems were and the difficulties. Do you paint African-esque work? Or do you do something else that’s more relevant to you? One of the things that made Barkley very wonderful and very special is that he searched out and started talking about things that were important to him, and that were important to most young black males. We all played basketball on the playgrounds. It was a way of declaring your manhood, a way of signaling to those around you that you had purpose, that you had skill. Where you determined who you were. You could go on the court and you could be anything. You could be the best you could possibly be, and no one could prevent you, except if they had better skill. So you honed your skills. 

BARKLEY HENDRICKS [Interview, 2014]: There was [an instructor] at the Academy named Walter Staumfig. Staumfig was very hard edge. He’d be very honest. Colorful language. He didn’t take any shit from anybody. Whenever he dealt with modernism or abstraction, he would let you know. One particular time, I brought two paintings to him: one was more geometric, one was the figure. The geometric images were of basketballs. I brought these two paintings and he looked at me and he pointed to the basketball piece and he says, ‘Turn that shit to the wall, it hurts my eyes, it reminds me of that goddamn French painter Leger.’

MOE BROOKER: Barkley didn’t care what Walter Staumfig thought about it. He would bring the work to him, and put it right there in front of him. Staumfig didn’t know what to say. He missed the point about Barkley making these paintings that was a statement about his masculinity as a young black male in this country, and what you could do and what you couldn’t do. He missed it entirely, completely. He was a good critic generally, but if you brought things he didn’t understand, he would insult you.

BARKLEY HENDRICKS [Writings, 2007]: Subjects like Toast and Reggie and Buck and Li’l Bits were all portraits I did in the office at Amos Playground. I also had the job of trying to stop the local gang members from drinking wine and smoking various weed products in the toilets. 

HENRY KULKOWITZ, HENDRICKS’ FIRST DEALER IN PHILADELPHIA: What Barkley Hendricks was showing me was pure, direct depictions of the world he was growing up in–unadulterated realism. Basketballs on round canvases. Full length, life-size portraits of people doing their thing. Intimate but honest depictions of our world, right in your face. 

RICHARD POWELL, PhD, ART HISTORIAN, DUKE UNIVERSITY: It’s not a stretch when you remember that Philadelphia is a very rich place in terms of black culture. John Coltrane spent formative years there. Very important black dancers come out of Philadelphia, as well as important African American artists and writers. This is really a rich center of black cultural life. It just takes a mind and an imagination and a belief in that culture to take it to the next level.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS, ARTIST: He was a visionary. He was thinking in very complex ways around things that people were yet to be aware of about the way that sports was becoming a new avenue for freedom and creative expression as a metaphor for other forms of liberation happening in the black community, and that the players and the sport were a canvas–a canvas for making dreams reality.