Barkley L. Hendricks

Known for: large-scale figurative portraits of Black Americans

Barkley L. Hendricks spent decades painting large-scale, life-size portraits of Black Americans against white, gold, or patterned grounds with a formal precision derived from his study of the Old Masters at Yale, where he received his MFA in 1972. His paintings — of friends, family members, and the people he encountered in his Hartford neighborhood — were largely overlooked by the mainstream art world until a 2008 retrospective at the Nasher Museum of Art. He is now recognized as a decisive precursor to the generation of figurative painters who include Kehinde Wiley and Kerry James Marshall.