The Sisters Who Refused to Fade: Barkley Hendricks and the Art of Recognition

In 1977, the world of American painting was moving away from faces. Abstraction had stripped canvas down to gesture, Minimalism to the grid, Pop Art to the cartoon. To be figurative, let alone realist, was to be unfashionable. And yet Barkley Hendricks carried on with oil and acrylic, looking at the world around him and insisting it was worth painting. He took the techniques of the Old Masters, thin, translucent layers, studied attention to posture, and the glow of skin, and applied them not to kings or dukes, not to the patrons who once commissioned portraits to broadcast their power, but to two sisters he had met in Boston.

Susan and Toni. Ordinary in the way that makes them extraordinary. Hendricks placed them against a darkness so complete that their shirts flared like neon, their jewelry glinted like sparks, and their faces emerged with a gravity that refused to be dismissed. He didn’t surround them with symbolic clutter. He gave them space, the kind of negative space once reserved for nobility, a void that transforms presence into declaration. They don’t smile for us, don’t explain themselves. They simply are, and that is the power.

“I was inspired by the masters and how they painted, but there was an absence of people I could recognize,” Hendricks once said. That absence was both personal and cultural in nature. A Black artist entering the halls of art history saw no reflection, no lineage that told him he belonged. So he painted one. He painted friends, lovers, passersby, people whose styles carried a charge, people who deserved the same permanence afforded to monarchs and martyrs. Where museums had nothing, Hendricks placed faces. Where history had excluded, he inscribed.

At the time, few knew what to do with him. Critics trained on the language of Conceptualism or Minimalism could not slot Hendricks in. His realism was dismissed as retrograde, his Black subjects sidelined as niche. For decades, his work hovered at the margins, admired by insiders but rarely canonized. He became a painter’s painter, a whisper of influence rather than a headline. Yet culture has a way of catching up to those it overlooks. In the 2000s, when portraiture reemerged as a radical act, when artists like Kehinde Wiley gained attention for re-centering Black presence in art’s grand tradition, eyes turned back to Hendricks. And there he was, having done it already, quietly, insistently, long before the moment had a name.

This rediscovery reframed him not as an outlier but as a forerunner. Retrospectives gave him the recognition withheld in his prime. Younger artists cited him as an ancestor of their vision. What had seemed “out of step” in 1977 became prophetic. Hendricks had modeled a way to claim space without apology, to fuse style with permanence, to insist that everyday Black life belonged on walls that once excluded it. Sisters (Susan and Toni), once just another canvas in his studio, now reads like an early manifesto in paint.

Standing before it today, what you feel isn’t nostalgia but recognition. These women aren’t relics of the seventies; they’re still here, looking at you with a gaze that shrugs off the centuries of absence that came before. Hendricks did not grant them dignity; they already had it. He granted them endurance. That endurance outlives fashion. It outlives neglect. It even outlives the artist himself, who passed in 2017, knowing, at last, that the world had caught up.

For me, this painting is more than portraiture. It is proof of what art can do when it refuses both trend and erasure. It is a reminder that history is built not only by those who storm the gates but by those who quietly repaint the walls. Hendricks’s gift was not invention, but recognition. He looked at people overlooked and said: You are already worthy. That might be the most radical gesture a painter can make.

And so Susan and Toni remain, their shirts still bright, their jewelry still sharp, their gaze still steady. They remind us that art’s true power is not in its cleverness or novelty, but in its ability to make presence permanent. They remind us to ask: who else has been left out of the frame? Who else waits to be painted, named, remembered? Hendricks provided us with an answer on Canvas. The rest is up to us.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Sisters (Susan and Toni), 1977. Oil and acrylic on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. Photograph by Drew Jaehnig. Image of the artwork is © the artist’s estate. Included here under fair use for purposes of commentary and criticism.

Barkley L. Hendricks at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 2013, in front of Bahsir (Robert Gowens) (1975). Photo by Duke Photography. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic (CC BY 2.5). Source: Wikimedia Commons.