Paintings of plants and fruit by Barkley L. Hendricks, famed for his postmodern portraiture of Black Americans

This first installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume publication project on Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) presents for the first time the artist's works on paper. These images--of flowers and plants, bananas, a watermelon, more abstract imagery--sometimes contain puns, or sometimes suggest the inner mechanics of Hendricks's mind and process, but retain the minute attention he paid his subjects, whether human, vegetable, or mineral.

Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume publication project consists of four hardcover volumes, each providing an in-depth exploration of a corpus of works integral to the artist's output--works on paper, landscape paintings, basketball paintings and photography--in addition to a comprehensive 300-page overview. Each volume includes an essay by a leading international scholar.