If youre gonna

‘If you’re gonna do it, you might as well be memorable,’ #BarkleyHendricks told @ThelmaGolden in the seminal 2008 monograph ‘Birth of the Cool.’ The artist, best known for his bold portraits of urban African-American people, surpassed memorable. Today, he is considered one of the most influential artists to have emerged in the late 20th century. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, he crafted and mastered a visual language entirely his own: post-modern depictions of cool, stylish, and self-aware subjects. Rendered with technical brilliance, many of Hendricks’s subjects face the viewer head-on, exuding their full human complexity. —