Barkley L. Hendricks

North Philly Niggah (William Corbett)

Barkley Hendricks painted the people he encountered in everyday life. He stated, “there’s a lot told in what one wears.”

Hendricks enjoyed meeting individuals with extraordinary styles of dress. He painted his family and friends, as well as people that he met on the street. The details of personalized clothing in Hendricks’s portraits ground his sitters in the everyday, while backgrounds of uninterrupted color recall Byzantine religious icons, elevating the notion of the ordinary.

William Corbett, the subject of North Philly Niggah, grew up in the same North Philadelphia neighborhood as the artist. While Hendricks left to enroll in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Corbett was incarcerated for armed robbery. The two men reunited after Corbett’s release, and Hendricks painted this portrait.

Corbett coolly gazes at the viewer while finely garbed and immaculately groomed, and his appearance bears no trace of his time in prison. He stands tall, equipped to greet his future with radiant confidence.