While the premise is to explore Hendricks’s connection to the Frick’s collection, the effect of the museum’s survey is to change the way we view those same paintings.
A dozen years ago, Barkley L. Hendricks, the pioneering portrait artist known for vivid, stylish paintings of Black men and women, stood outside the Frick Collection in New York, known
Hendricks’s calculatedly cool, compositionally and chromatically bold, and fiercely character-driven visions from the 1960s–80s make this the Frick’s most daring contemporary art intervention to date, and its most effective.