"Trevor Schoonmaker wrote in his essay for The Birth of the Cool: 'While best known for his bold life-sized portraits, Hendricks is also an accomplished photographer,landscape painter, watercolorist, draftsman, assemblage artist, carpenter, and jazz musician'. Schoonmaker had identified the essential aspect of Hendrick’s relentlessly questing mind: 'a desire to continually learn, experiment, and take risks.' (Read the full article from Red Milk Magazine.)

"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.

In these portraits, he attempted to imbue a proud, dignified presence upon his subjects. He frequently painted black Americans against monochrome interpretations of urban northeastern American backdrops. Hendricks' work is unique for its marriage of American realism and post-modernism. Although Hendricks did not pose his subjects as celebrities, victims, or protesters, the subjects depicted in his works were often the voices of the under-represented blacks of the 1960s and 1970s. Hendricks even stood alongside his subjects and featured himself in works, like in Brilliantly Endowed (Self portrait), 1977 where he painted himself nude in response to an art critic's comments on his show."  (Read the full article from en.wikipedia.org.)