Barkley L. Hendricks is first artist of color to get solo show at Frick
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 Manhattan, known for its works by European Old Masters. He was explaining his love for Rembrandt.
“It's like good music,” the artist said that day. “You can be replenished every time you hear it.”
By the time Hendricks died in 2017, the art world was finally giving overdue recognition to his work, which applied centuriesold traditions of European painting to depictions of Black figures — friends, relatives or strangers he photographed in the streets with his Polaroid. Still, curators say, he'd likely have never imagined that in 2023, he'd be the first artist of color to have a solo show at the 88-year-old Frick.
“I think this is probably beyond his wildest dreams,” said co-curator Antwaun Sargent as he surveyed the room ahead of the show's opening late last week, “to be showing in the institution that he so revered.”
It's not surprising that
Hendricks would have loved the Frick, given his admiration for artists like Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Van Eyck, Velásquez and others. What is more unusual is that a museum focusing on the 14th through 19th centuries would devote a show to a contemporary portraitist like Hendricks. The Frick does not collect works made after 1900.
So it's an important moment not only for Hendricks and his legacy but for the museum and its place in the cultural life of New York, says co-curator Aimee Ng.
“This is as much about the story of the Frick and its identity and place in New York City,” Ng said in an interview ahead of the opening. She said the exhibit, along with celebrating Hendricks, celebrates the museum “as an institution that inspired people like Barkley, who would seem to have nothing to do with historic art as a contemporary artist, but went on to mine the Frick as a place for his own innovations.”
The exhibit is also the last major show to take place at the museum's temporary digs, Frick Madison, before a return next year to its grand Beaux-Arts setting on Fifth Avenue following a renovation.