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Connecticut artist Barkley Hendricks is having a big week. He was one of ten visual artists to receive a $50,000 fellowship from a national arts organization, and a retrospective of his paintings opens in New York on Wednesday.

Barkley Hendricks grew up in Philadelphia and studied at Yale. Formal, life-size portraits of the black men and women from these urban neighborhoods are his best-known works.

"You paint what's familiar to you. You look at what Rembrandt did, he did people around him. So I'm not dealing with anything differently than they did."

His latest exhibition is called Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool. It is a retrospective of his paintings that dates back to 1964.  It opens at the Studio Museum in Harlem this week, just days after he received a $50,000 grant from the Chicago-based arts group United States Artists, which supports the work of the nation's finest creative talents. 

"Well, I'm taking it in stride. I don't want to be blasse about it, but it's kind of business as usual."

But Hendricks says it wasn't always this way.

"Honestly, in terms of the acceptance, twenty or thirty years ago, people weren't interested in dealing with black imagery."

He says there is still work to do to crack open the arts establishment, but he's staying focused on just producing new art. His latest work is of Jamaican landscapes and women warriors from Ghana. He also wants to experiment more with gold leaf, and with the price of metals these days, he says that's where the grant will help out.

Hendricks is currently wrapping up a stint as an artist in residence at Duke University. He returns to New London next semester, where he is a professor of studio art at Connecticut College.