Pioneering Black portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks is first artist of color to get solo show at Frick

By JOCELYN NOVECK
AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The pioneering Black portrait artist Barkley L. Hendricks loved to visit the Frick Collection in New York, where he admired its Old Master European works by artists like Rembrandt and Van Dyck. Now Hendricks, who died in 2017, is the first artist of color to have a solo exhibit at the Frick. Curators say it’s an important moment not only for the artist’s legacy but for the museum and its place in New York’s cultural life. The show — open now through January 7 — displays 14 of Hendricks’ large, vivid oil paintings of Black men and women, most of them painted from Polaroid photos that he took of friends, relatives and strangers in the streets.