The William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut is pleased to be exhibiting Barkley L. Hendricks: Some Like It Hot, a selection of the artist’s works created in Jamaica and West Africa. The exhibition will be on view from October 25 through December 18, 2011*, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 27, 2011, 4:30–6:30 pm. The public is invited.
A self-proclaimed “fair weather artist,” Hendricks has for many years traveled to Jamaica each January to escape the Connecticut winters and to enjoy painting midst the lovely warm weather. The results are large-scale figurative paintings, landscapes on lunette and tondo-shaped canvases, renderings in oil and watercolor of fruits and vegetation, and photographs of, among others, Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti. A series of photographs taken at Kuti’s concerts will be shown for the first time.
Hendricks draws inspiration for his works from the people who populate his world. “You paint what you know, who you know,” he says. The subjects of his figurative paintings are friends, students, and strangers who have influenced him in some way. Many of his paintings are framed in decorative frames to further play upon the pleasure factor.
Hendricks is a graduate of Yale, a recently retired Professor of Studio Art at Connecticut College, and a resident of New London since 1972. While at Yale in the 1970s, he painted landscapes and the human figure while his peers focused on the abstract and minimalist movements of the period. His previous exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, was a much-acclaimed traveling exhibition that enjoyed a five-museum run. About it, he said that his art was a reflection of “a cool state of mind in a warm climate.”
The William Benton Museum of Art, the Connecticut State Art Museum, is located at the University of Connecticut, 245 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269. Ph 860.486.4520. www.thebenton.org. www.facebook/benton.museum. Handicapped accessible. The galleries are open Tuesday-Friday: 10-4:30 and Saturday & Sunday: 1-4:30. The Store at The Benton and The Beanery are open Tuesday-Friday 8:30-4, Saturday and Sunday 1-4.
*The Benton will be closed November 21–28 for Thanksgiving.
