Barkley L. Hendricks: INTIMATE IMPRESSIONS

Curated by Shari Fischberg
​On view August 4 - October 23 , 2022

EDWARD HOPPER HOUSE MUSEUM & STUDY CENTER is pleased to present BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: INTIMATE IMPRESSIONS on view from August 4 through October 23, 2022. Curated by Shari Fischberg, Intimate Impressions is organized in conjunction with the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and features eighteen rarely seen or never-before-exhibited landscape paintings created during the artist’s annual winter sojourns to the island of Jamaica. 

The exhibition draws its title from Edward Hopper’s musings on the aim of his painting, which, in a 1959 interview, he said, “has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature. If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man’s activities.”

Barkley L. Hendricks, Blue, Green and Black River, Jan. 2, 2003, oil on canvas. Courtesy the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Barkley L. Hendricks, Blackbird Valley, 12-28-2002, oil on canvas. Courtesy the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In 1983, Hendricks and his wife, Susan, began their regular travels to Jamaica during his winter breaks from teaching at Connecticut College. Over the next three decades, Hendricks embraced Jamaica as a healing place away from the cold weather of New London, CT. Inspired by the island’s surroundings and pure, spacious light, Hendricks sought to capture this ethereal beauty, creating dozens of plein air paintings of mountains, vistas, distant villages, and limestone quarries. 

Barkley L. Hendricks, Great Bay (Full View), 1997 oil on canvas, Courtesy the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Composed on oval, lunette (half-moon), or tondo (round) canvases, Hendricks’ paintings also function as portholes, inviting us into the world of the natural and sublime. Mounted in gold leaf frames, the paintings emulate the shape of the human eye, offering a central field of vision and limiting the peripheral view. Hendricks wished for us to deal with what was in front of us without distraction and free from the direct social commentary of Black culture often attached to his life-sized studio portraits. He offers a place in the midst of the terrain absent of human intervention to contemplate.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Marlhole Boxing Day, 2007, oil on linen, private collection

The timelessness of Hendricks’ landscapes transports us to another time and place, offering respite from our daily human struggles. Hendricks was also conscious of the island’s significance to the culture of the African and Black Diaspora and the historic impact of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial rule. Hendricks wrote, “when I sit down to paint, occasionally I am reminded of the history of Jamaica and its associations beyond my narrow perspectives of aesthetics. The roads and fields I find myself on and in have many stories to tell beyond my creative motivations and responses to what I see around me.”

For Hendricks, painting outdoors in Jamaica offered a welcome creative alternative to the long, intense process of studio portraits and representations of contemporary Black subjects. "With the figure,” he remarked, “you have to plan the pose, the props, the clothing. In Jamaica, I can finish a painting in a day.” Likewise, Hopper found that landscapes allowed for an immediacy of expression that was not possible with his studio paintings. Hopper’s plein air oil paintings, primarily created before he took up watercolor in 1923, were rendered with spontaneity and thick, bold brushwork that stands in contrast to the thin, tight brushstrokes and flatter surface of his later work.

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Barkley L. Hendricks: Intimate Impressions, organized in conjunction with the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, is made possible, in part, by funds provided by a New York Council on the Arts Support for Organizations Grant. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945 – 2017) attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1963 to 1967, where he became the first African American student to be awarded two consecutive travel scholarships, which took him to Europe and North Africa. In Morocco, Hendricks immersed himself in textiles and Moorish architecture, and in Europe, he studied the paintings of the old masters. While fascinated by 19th-century European portraiture, Hendricks was struck by the lack of representation of people of color. Yet, even before his international travels, Hendricks’ representation of lesser known subjects, such as My Black Nun, 1964 (The Studio Museum in Harlem), demonstrates intense attention to light and reflection that would fuel his entire life’s work. 

When Hendricks entered Yale University’s MFA program in 1970, he found himself immersed in a community of abstract and minimalist painters. Under the mentorship of Tom Brown and Walker Evans, he turned his focus to photography. While this medium remained a lifelong passion and influence in his work, Hendricks became most renowned as a contemporary realist painter, revolutionizing African American and Latino portraiture in the 1970s and 1980s. His visceral life sized portraits of black and brown subjects challenged the status quo of the art world, providing a critical perspective on the social tensions of his time. 

In 1972, Hendricks was named Professor of Studio Art at Connecticut College in New London, where he taught drawing, illustration, oil and watercolor painting, and photography, until his retirement in 2010. The artist died seven years later of a cerebral hemorrhage. His distinguished career has recently been celebrated in such exhibitions as “Birth of the Cool,'' organized in 2008 by the Nasher Art Museum at Duke University, and in "My Mechanical Sketchbook" which opened in 2022 at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum.

ABOUT THE GUEST CURATOR

​Shari Fischberg is an artist, art educator and independent curator. She received her BFA from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA from CUNY Queens College. Shari was a founding teacher of The Cypress Hill Community School in Brooklyn, where she created an arts program with a dual language curriculum. She has worked extensively to support programming that brings the visual arts to public schools where the arts are limited or non-existent. Some teaching residencies include The Museum of Children’s Art Oakland and The Anne Frank Museum U.S.A. As Director of Special Programs for the Studio in a School Association, Shari oversaw teaching residencies and developed professional development for teaching artists and art teachers across New York City. She was Assistant Professor in the Art and Design Education Department at Pratt Institute from 2006-2016 and Adjunct Professor at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Presently, she is tenured faculty in the art department at The Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City.

Shari lives in the Hudson River Valley where she maintains a studio practice. For over a decade, she has worked in various capacities to support the arts in Rockland County . She has curated multiple shows for Riverspace Arts and The Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center, where she is also a member of the Gallery Selection Committee. In 2009, Shari was appointed by The Rockland County Legislature to be on the committee for Arts in Public Places, a one percent for public art fund. Shari is on the Board of Advisors for An Inclusive World, an interdisciplinary art and design program based in New York City.

In 2000, The New York City Board of Education as a Teacher of the Year honored her for her work.