American artist Barkley L. Hendricks treats everyday style as dignity and portraiture as recognition. By isolating two Black women, identified as Susan (left) and Toni (right), on a gray, monochrome field, he turns the smallest choices like cap brim, belt buckle, and bracelet glint into signals of agency and self-definition. Susan and Toni stand side by side against a deep, nearly solid dark background that makes their clothing and skin tones feel luminous. Susan, a dark-brown–skinned woman with a calm, steady expression, wears a pale blue short-sleeve button-up shirt with an open collar and a matching light blue cap. Her dark jeans sit high at the waist, held by a belt. Her stance is relaxed, with one hand in a pocket, and she wears bright white shoes. Toni, also dark-brown–skinned, faces forward with a direct, composed gaze. She wears a light green sleeveless top and a matching headscarf topped by a pair of round sunglasses. Her high-waisted dark jeans echo Susan’s, and she wears white shoes as well. Jewelry like rings, a bracelet, a watch, and earrings are painted with crisp precision, emphasizing texture such as metal catching light, fabric seams, and the subtle sheen of denim. The women feel life-size and present, their bodies upright and self-possessed, with no surrounding scene to distract from their shared presence. The work is also unusual for Hendricks as a double portrait with two people sharing the frame without hierarchy, held together by rhythm (matching jeans, repeated whites, and parallel stances) while remaining distinctly themselves. Painted in the 1970s, when Hendricks was refining his life-size portraits of Black sitters, the picture pushes back against the long absence of Black women from “official” painting traditions ... and without asking them to perform anything except being exactly who they are. The result is intimate and iconic at once for a portrait of relationship, presence, and the quiet power of being seen on one's own terms.

"Sisters (Susan and Toni)" by Barkley L. Hendricks (American) - Oil and acrylic on canvas / 1977 - Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, Virginia) #WomenInArt #BarkleyLHendricks #Hendricks #BarkleyHendricks #art #artText #BlackArt #BlackArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #VMFA #VirginiaMuseumofFineArts

5 minute sketch study: #BarkleyHendricks (1945 - 2017)

It’s challenging to sketch and hold a camera.

The Sisters Who Refused to Fade: Barkley Hendricks and the Art of Recognition In 1977, the world of American painting was moving away from faces. Abstraction had stripped canvas down to gesture, Minimalism to the grid,...

In 1977, Barkley Hendricks painted "Sisters" (Susan and Toni), turning absence into recognition and presence into permanence. My new essay: tinyurl.com/5effde2z

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African American artist Barkley L. Hendricks created this 1973 full-length portrait of a Black woman standing against an unbroken pink field. Her skin is a warm coffee brown with subtle highlights along her shoulders, knees, and cheekbones. She wears a fitted white tank top printed with the word “SLAVE” across the chest, dark maroon shorts, and sleek knee-high black boots. Her arms are crossed; one leg angles forward so her weight sits on her back hip, projecting poise and refusal. A round afro frames her face. Large tinted sunglasses partially veil her eyes, yet her stance reads as unmistakably direct. The flat, shadowless background removes spatial cues, centering her presence. There are no props or context so that access begins with what she asserts and with what history inscribes upon Black women’s bodies. The painting compresses centuries of commodification into the present tense. The title nods to “Bid ’Em In,” Oscar Brown Jr.’s searing performance of a slave auctioneer’s chant, a reminder that language itself once priced women’s lives. Hendricks seizes that history and counters it with Angie’s self-possession: crossed arms, planted feet, and cool fashion. His portraits, he said, were “about people that were part of my life… If they were political, it’s because they were a reflection of the culture we were drowning in.” Here, the politics arrive through clarity via the blunt word on the shirt colliding with a subject who will not bend to it. The pink field is both seductive and disarming, pulling our gaze to the body that history tried to name. Hendricks hallmark monochrome background, strips away distractions so that style, attitude, and dignity do the work of re-humanization. At over 6 feet tall, the canvas enforces a face-to-face encounter that museums long denied to Black women. Angie’s presence turns the auctioneer’s call inside out: the look, the stance, and the cool all bid us to witness not an object for sale, but a person on her own terms.

“Bid ’Em In/Slave (Angie)” by Barkley L. Hendricks (American) - Oil and acrylic on canvas / 1973 - Sheldon Museum of Art (Lincoln, Nebraska) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #BarkleyL.Hendricks #Hendricks #BarkleyHendricks #SheldonMuseumofArt #PortraitofaWoman #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArtist

Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career (from photography to landscape painting), Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans. Hendricks was born in Philadelphia in 1945 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Yale University. His work deals with contemporary black life and culture. He combines realism, Pop and abstraction to create a thoroughly modern, yet simultaneously timeless, style. But Hendricks does not simply illustrate his subjects. These life-sized figures facilitate a confrontation between the viewer and the painting. He portrays unique individuals that, through their poses and clothing, assert their style, individuality and self-awareness. Estelle Johnson, a South Carolina native, was a student at Connecticut College, where Hendricks was Professor of Studio Art — teaching drawing, illustration, oil, and watercolor painting, plus photography, from 1972 until his retirement in 2010, when he became Professor Emeritus. He was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement and was the first African American to have a solo exhibit at the Frick Collection in Manhattan for his portraits of Black men and women. A plain bright green background draws all attention to the caramel-skinned and beautiful Estelle, isolating her from any other context. She is wearing a black jumpsuit with flared legs and thin red and white stripes across the midriff. She's also wearing a dark headwrap and long earrings. She carries a brown shoulder bag. Her posture is relaxed, one hand resting on her hip and the other holding the bag's strap. Her expression conveys individuality, with her eyes lowered. The visually impactful painting conveys a sense of quietude and likely a reflection on Estelle’s style and identity during the 1970s.

Ms. Johnson (Estelle) by Barkley Hendricks (American) - Oil snd acrylic on linen canvas / 1972 - Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, South Carolina) #WomenInArt #ArtText #art #BarkleyHendricks #Hendricks #1970s #artwork #womensart #GibbesMuseum #portrait #AfricanAmericanArtist #AfricanAmericanArt

The Three Graces, figures from Greek mythology, was a popular motif for artists throughout early modern European art—from Sandro Botticelli to Peter Paul Rubens to Antonio Canova. American artist Barkley L. Hendricks acknowledged the “direct influence” of the theme on this portrait of an unnamed Connecticut College student. She had sent anonymous letters to Hendricks, and, after he learned her identity, she posed for him. “She was married at the time,” he recalled, and her husband came to the studio. “I told him, ‘I am interested in painting, not messing around,’ and the brother never came back. And I finished the piece.” Linda McClellan identified herself as the model, but disputed that she’d sent anonymous letters saying she, “never in my lifetime, wrote anonymous letters to anyone, but there were a lot of admiring young women there that one of them may have been writing him anonymous letters.” She described it this way, “I’d been married for almost a year. My husband was in the military in Georgia, and he was just a second lieutenant; we didn’t have a lot of money. So, I was looking for jobs on campus, and one of the jobs was that you could model for the art classes. And I modeled for a couple of classes, and one of them was, well, no, the only one was his, I believe. At that point, he asked me would I pose for him. That’s how I met Barkley. He had definite ideas about how he wanted me to look and dress. He said ‘bring some things over.’ Basically, long dresses. So, I brought the one that as you see in the painting and a few more things. But he preferred that dress. Even though I only wore my glasses for reading, he wanted me to wear those. And he wanted me to wear red fingernail polish which I really never wear. And the big hoop earrings, which I did wear. I knew as the painting progressed, that it was going to be white-on-white. And uh, I didn’t know why because how are you going to see the dress? It’s white; it’s on white. But you know, it turned out ok.

“October's Gone...Goodnight” by Barkley L. Hendricks (American) - Oil & acrylic on linen canvas / 1973 - Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, Massachusetts) #womeninart #art #BarkleyHendricks #Hendricks #womensart #HarvardArtMuseums #artwork #ArtText #AfricanAmericanArt #1970s #AfticanAmericanArtist

Barkley L. Hendricks
American artist
1945-2017
Lagos Ladies (Gbemi, Bisi, Niki, Christy), 1978
Oil, acrylic, and magna on cotton canvas
72 x 60 in.

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Did you know Barkley L. Hendricks wasn’t just a painter—he was a style icon himself?

🎨 Known for his bold, life-sized portraits, he captured the swag, elegance, and unapologetic confidence of Black individuals, often inspired by everyday people he saw on the streets.
#BarkleyHendricks

An African American woman (the artist's cousin Kathy Williams) strongly faces forward and takes up the center of the solid gold space. She has a beautiful Afro hairstyle and wears a short-sleeved black dress with orange stripes. Inspired by lyrics by Nina Simone, the painting’s title evokes, with a touch of humor, the traditional “Lord” and “Mother” of the Christian faith. The style of the painting is inspired by Byzantine and early Italian Renaissance paintings. In them, gold-leaf backgrounds signal the divine, conveying through material splendor the importance of the devotional object, prompting wonder and meditation. Lawdy Mama’s rounded top, crafted by Hendricks himself, echoes the geometry of Renaissance art and frames the sitter’s afro-as-halo. Hendricks learned the painstaking process of applying gold leaf after returning from Europe in 1966. Noting the delicacy of the precious material, he wrote, “The slightest wind or heavy breath will send it fluttering all over the place.” Though he acknowledged finding inspiration for his metallic paintings in gold-leaf panels from centuries prior, Hendricks also appreciated them as “shiny things” that appeal to viewers regardless of their knowledge of historical precedents.

Lawdy Mama by Barkley L. Hendricks (American) - Oil and gold leaf on canvas / 1969 - Studio Museum in Harlem (New York) #womeninart #portrait #painting #art #StudioMuseuminHarlem #fineart #oilpainting #BarkleyLHendricks #womensart #Hendricks #portraitofawoman #artwork #BarkleyHendricks #artoftheday

Against an off white backdrop, a woman with Afro hair style stands expressionless with hands behind her back while looking down to her right. She wears an all black pantsuit plus thin gold glasses and belt. On his first trip to Europe in 1966, Hendricks was struck by a portrait in the Uffizi gallery, in Florence, by the Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista Moroni: “The figure in a black, skin-tight outfit made me see the illusion of form and simplicity in a different light.” Miss T was a “direct by-product” of this encounter with the four-hundred-year-old painting. Hendricks’s subject, Robin Taylor, was his then-girlfriend: “Several paintings come with good color besides what’s on their canvases. Robin (Miss T) scared the shit out of my mother when she told her, ‘If she couldn't have me, no one would.’”

Miss T (Robin Taylor) by Barkley L. Hendricks (American) - Oil and acrylic on canvas / 1969 - Philadelphia Museum of Art (Pennsylvania) #womeninart #hendricks #fineart #philadelphiamuseumofart #painting #barkleyhendricks #womensart #artwork #art #acrylic #oil #portrait #portraitofawoman #bskyart

1/

in college, i was blessed to have Barkley Hendricks as my advisor for 2 years.

he was a bit gruffer that other prof's, but i came to really appreciate his honesty, and he taught me a lot.

#BarkleyHendricks #ArtAdvice

Rest in Peace Slick
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