Best known for his life-sized portraits of ordinary people living mostly in the urban northeast, Barkley L. Hendricks’s bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common man and woman to celebrity status. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is the first painting retrospective of the American artist, and includes over 50 works from 1964 to the present. For CAMH’s presentation, a series of photographic works by the artist from a related exhibition, Walkin' with Walker: Narrative Photography of Barkley L. Hendricks, will be included. Spanning four decades of work, Walkin’ with Walker was organized by The African American Museum in Philadelphia and co-curated by Barkley L. Hendricks and Richard J. Watson, curator of exhibitions.
 
Hendricks’s stylistic renderings connect the art movements of American realism and post-modernism, occupying a space between contemporary portraitists like Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black painters such as Romare Bearden and Beauford Delaney. The exhibition is composed primarily of full-figure portraits, as well as lesser-known early works and the artist’s more recent portal-like paintings of the Jamaican landscape, where he returns annually to do outdoor en plein air painting. 
 
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is the final touring venue for Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool after stops at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Widely recognized for his pulsating hues and meticulously painted wall and canvas works, Odili Donald Odita creates paintings that often function as narratives. Although devoid of any discernable figurative marks, the works tell of the nomadic journey of our ever-shifting global society: shapes and intersecting lines become metaphors for time and place while color evokes mood and impulse. Perspectives 169: Odili Donald Odita features a site-specific environment created from a new body of paintings that echo the unique architectural features of the Museum’s lower gallery space, The Zilkha Gallery. The result is a familiar, yet fantastical immersive landscape. While Odita’s wall works often find corollary references to those of Sol LeWitt, his angular pulsating color fields immediately hint at the artist’s cultural roots—he was born in Enugu, Nigeria and raised in Columbus, Ohio. Odita’s abstract paintings suggest the fractal nature of his own experience as an African émigré and the interweaving of his past and present selves.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Odili Donald Odita received a BFA (with distinction) in painting from The Ohio State University and an MFA from Vermont’s Bennington College in 1990. He has been included in many national and international group exhibitions including La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2007); DAK’ART 2004, Dakar, Senegal (2004); A Fiction Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2003); Black President The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the New Museum, NY (2003); and 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1997). His solo exhibitions and projects include such venues as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2008); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY (2007); Haunch of Venison (Galerie Judin Belot), Zürich, Switzerland (2004); and the Matrix Art Project, Brussels, Belgium (2003) among many others. Odita is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, NY and Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa. He is currently Associate Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.