Barkley L. Hendricks, the African-American portrait artist who died in 2017, at the age of 72, counted the Frick as one of his favorite museums. Like European painters from the Renaissance to Romanticism, whose works are featured in the Frick collection, Hendricks was a practitioner of the Old Master tradition. He applied the techniques to his life-size portraits of Black Americans, which he contextualized within popular culture and its political discourse. Lawdy Mama (1969), for example, was made using a gold-leaf technique previously employed in Italian religious art from the 15th Century. Only here, instead of a halo the subject wears an Afro, a prominent Black hairstyle that embodied the tenets of the newly established Black Panther Party. Hendricks is now the subject of an exhibition at the Frick, a turning point for a museum that has never before presented an artist of color in a solo show. A dozen pieces by Hendricks will be interspersed throughout the Frick’s galleries, physically and figuratively securing his place in the historical cannon. Antwaun Sargent, who has organized the exhibition with the curator Aimee Ng, wants to make one thing clear: Hendricks’s paintings, he says, are “as significant as anything else on any other wall in the museum.” —Nyla Gilstrap