Barkley L. Hendricks is best known for his striking portraits of black Americans, definitive images of “cool realism” and “black cool.” Throughout his career, however, he was torn between his desire to paint abstract works and his duty to represent his African American community—a struggle the art critic Franklin Sirmans calls “the proverbial black painter’s burden.” This online exhibition displays Hendricks’s rarely seen basketball paintings of the 1960s and 70s. His investigations are based on geometry, color, and line, and the inflection is minimalist. —E.C.

Barkley L. Hendricks: In the Paint
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Jack Shainman Gallery / New York / Art
Jack Shainman Gallery / New York / Art
Barkley L. Hendricks, “Still Life #5,” 1968. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.
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