[3] After graduating from PAFA in 1967, Hendricks decided to enlist in the New Jersey National Guard and found work as an arts and crafts teacher with the Philadelphia Department of Recreation.

[1][5] At Yale, he studied with Bernard Chaet, Lester Johnson, Gabor Peterdi, Robert Reed, and the photographer Walker Evans.

[4] In his visits to the museums and churches of Britain, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, he found his own race was absent from Western art, leaving a void that troubled him.

[4][10] In the 1970s, he produced a series of portraits of young black men, usually placed against monochromatic backdrops, that captured their self-assurance and confident sense of style.

Kramer praised Hendricks, but referred to his style using racist terms such as "slick," and called him "brilliantly endowed.

"[20] Similarly, Rashid Johnson's Self-Portrait in Homage to Barkley Hendricks, 2005, reenacted Brilliantly Endowed for the camera, almost 30 years later.

[19] In 1984, Hendricks turned away from painted portraiture during a period he referred to as the "Ronaissance," during the years of the Ronald Reagan presidency.

[22] His work, New Orleans Niggah, 1973, hung in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., when it opened in 2016.

[23] In 2017 Hendricks’s portraits were included in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, installed in the Great Hall of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

"Legacy of the Cool" included work by such notable artists as Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Hank Willis Thomas, Thomashi Jackson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Delphine Diallo, and Nona Faustine.