Mickalene Thomas and the legacy of Barkley L. Hendricks lecture July 14 7PM At the Santa Monica Museum

Installation by Mickalene Thomas at the Luggage Store 2007

Mickalene Thomas


All Paintings below by Barkley L. Hendrick

July 14th 7PM

Santa Monica Museum

Generation Next: Mickalene Thomas and the Legacy of Barkley L. Hendricks

Artist Mickalene Thomas in conversation with Lisa Melandri, SMMoA Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Programs. Thomas' work has received great attention and critical acclaim for its astonishing and unique surface and its simultaneously poignant and over-the-top representation of the black figure. In this conversation, Thomas will discuss the influence of Barkley L. Hendricks on her work as well as the development of her complex subject matter.

Free Admission
Limited Seating; first come, first seated

Barkley L. Hendricks At the Santa Monica Museum

The renowned artist’s first career retrospective highlights his paintings from 1964 to 2007. While Hendricks has worked in a variety of media throughout his career, and has explored diverse subject matter, he is best known for his striking and provocative life-sized portraits of everyday African-American people from the urban northeast. Bringing to mind American realism, pop culture, and post-modernism in a way uniquely his own, Hendricks’ pioneering contributions to African-American portraiture and conceptualism claims a compelling space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz, and African-American conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. At times cool, at times confrontational, sometimes sexually charged, and always empowering, the work reveals the artist’s keen eye for his subject’s attire, attitude, style, and point of view. Hendricks' groundbreaking body of work has both influenced and paved the way for many of today's generation of artists.

Hendricks calls his camera his “mechanical sketchbook,” as many of his paintings are realized from photographs of people he encountered in daily life.

Birth of the Cool is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina.

I saw this show at the Studio Museum in Harlem with Laurie Lazer of the Luggage Store and a few friends - painters from SF and NYC. The show totally blew our minds. Nothing is better than going in to a museum or gallery and seeing a retrospective of an artist you never knew before or maybe just saw a singular work of previously and having your mind blown. This happened to me when I saw the work of Barkley L. Hendricks. The show is currently at the
Santa Monica Museum of Art. So check it out before it comes down.

I met Mickalene Thomas at her show at the Luggage Store, San Francisco. She is an amazing painter and and also creates live installations which her paintings are born out of or perhaps the other way around. For starters- her art is inspired by her mother and African American style of the 1970's.