CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/28/2024

Heart, humor and humanity in ‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid!’

Just in time for Black History Month, leap-year edition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! has arrived! Collecting the influential American figurative painter’s iconic portraits alongside his increasingly prized landscapes, geometric abstractions, watercolors and photographs, this is the major and must-have monograph on the artist. Featured here is his 1979 painting, Have You Met Ms. Jones, from editor Zoé Whitley’s essay, “For the Love of You: Barkley L. Hendricks’s Reasons for Painting.” In it, Whitley cites Toni Morrison’s noted 2019 essay on “The Source of Self-Regard” in Black culture, which Morrison traced in music, lyrics, “the literature, the language, the custom, the posture…” and other evolutions in how “the possibility of personal freedom, and interior imaginative freedom […] could be engaged.” “Like Morrison,” Whitley concludes, “Barkley L. Hendricks took in all of these aspects and translated physical bodies into a body of work too often reduced to cool surfaces, but in reality teeming with heart, humor and humanity.”