What:  Barkley L. Hendricks:  Birth of the Cool, Paintings 1964-2007 @ Santa Monica Museum of Art

Where:  Bergamot Station G1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, CA 90404

When: through August 22, 2009

Why:  This is the first retrospective of painter Barkley L. Hendricks’ work from 1964-2007.  Hendricks, a graduate of Yale’s renowned MFA program, has worked with a variety of materials but is best known for his arresting life size portraits of African American subjects from the urban northeast.  Blending pop iconography from the realms of fashion and music, Hendricks fuses post-modernism with African-American conceptualism. His paintings are fresh and original while calling to mind the work of Chuck Close, Alex Katz, David Simmons, and Adrian Piper.  Birth of the Cool was named one of Vogue magazine’s top 25 cultural events of the year.