Celebrating African-American Artist Barkley Hendricks

There are only a few days left before February, which is Black History month, is over. On The Pagan Sphinx blog, we've celebrated writer and historian Zora Neale Hurston and now it's time for some African-American art. I present you with the fine work of American painter Barkley L. Hendricks.

 Barkley L. Hendricks

1945-

The painter Barkley L. Hendricks caught not only the mood, but also the dress of black Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, the subhead of the Studio Museum’s exhibition, “Birth of the Cool,” gives the nod to the development of a style whose casual hipness and intimated militancy marked a generation of African Americans read the whole article here

The paintings below were featured in the exhibition Birth of the Cool at Studio Museum, 

Harlem, New York

Celebrating Zora Neale Hurston

 Zora Neal Hurston

African American author, folklorist and anthropologist

1891-1960

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."
~ Zora Neale Hurston

 

"THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD belongs in the same category with [the works of] William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, that of enduring American literature."
     - Saturday Review

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

-from Their Eyes Were Watching God 

"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."
     - Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen

 

Zora Festival 

"It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion."

 ~Zora Neale Hurston