Barkley L. Hendricks

The third book of the five-volume publication project on Hendricks, famed for his postmodern portraiture of Black Americans.

The third book of the five-volume publication project presents the artist’s basketball paintings. The publication highlights how basketball was a vital inspiration for Hendricks’ art, as well as a way to experiment with the different shapes and forms of the playing court. For the first time, they are grouped together in a dedicated volume.

Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery have partnered to realize an unprecedented book project dedicated to the artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017). The project consists of 4 booklets, each of which provides an in-depth exploration of a body of work integral to the artist’s output (Works on Paper, Landscape Paintings, Basketball Paintings, Photography), in addition to a comprehensive 300-page monograph which traces the artist’s evolution for the entirety of his career.

The project is tied to an extensive and never-accomplished-before recovery of the artist’s archive. Each book will contain essays by different scholars that are leading international players. Each booklet allows for a detailed, oriented study of key bodies of works

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) is an artist profoundly integral and pivotal to art and African-American culture. Barkley L. Hendricks was a painter and photographer best known for his realist and post-modern portraits of people of color living in urban areas beginning in the 1960s and 70s and continuing to the present.

Hendricks was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lived and worked in New London, Connecticut. He earned both his BFA and MFA from Yale University and was the subject of a large-scale traveling exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, organized by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2008), which traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008-2009), Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2009), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2009-2010) and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2010).

His work is included in numerous public collections both within the United States and abroad, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY