Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke presents the first career retrospective of the renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks's unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast.

Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists. This unprecedented exhibition of Hendricks's paintings will include work from 1964 to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum, is organizing the show. The exhibition catalogue, distributed by Duke University Press, will include contributions from Schoonmaker, Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.

The exhibition will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum (Los Angeles), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.