When Ernie Barnes died in 2009, his daughter Erin was left to go through the materials the Los Angeles-based painter and former professional football player had gathered over decades of artistic work.
Alongside canvases were paint tubes, brushes, and containers Barnes kept in the garage he used as a studio to produce vivid, energetic images of Black church gatherings, football games, and nightlife during the Jim Crow era, including his iconic painting “The Sugar Shack” (1976), which helped make him one of Southern California’s most cherished artists.
For years, Barnes held onto her father’s partially used Liquitex, Grumbacher, and Winsor & Newton acrylic paint tubes and thought little of them until about a year ago, when she began to see the materials as essential to honoring his legacy.
“I realized how much of the physical studio still existed through the paint tubes and brushes, and I felt a responsibility to preserve them as part of a record of his historical practice,” Barnes told Hyperallergic. “These tubes are the physical remnants of his creative process.”
Black figurative painters including Jacob Lawrence, Amy Sherald, and Kerry James Marshall have been widely celebrated by museums and institutions over the last decade. Barnes is not always mentioned alongside other contemporary art stars, even after “The Sugar Shack” sold for $15.3 million in 2022. Its buyer, energy trader Bill Perkins, told the New York Times that “for certain segments of America, it’s more famous than the ‘Mona Lisa.’”
That may be changing. A major documentary on Barnes’s life, Who is Ernie Barnes, was announced in July, and the Canton Museum of Art in Ohio opened a special exhibition devoted to his work, Good Times: The Artistic Journey of Ernie Barnes, on August 18. Some of Barnes’s pieces will also be shown at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens to the public on September 22.
Barnes grew up in Durham, North Carolina, during Jim Crow segregation and learned about art from books and catalogs because museums would not admit Black people. Encouraged by his mother, he drew throughout childhood and later attended North Carolina College, now North Carolina Central University, on a football scholarship.
He emerged as a talented college athlete and was drafted into the NFL, where he played for five seasons. Even so, he never left art behind, often sketching other players in pencil or charcoal while on the sidelines during games.
“His teammates were in awe of how he could come up with an idea and sketch it right away,” Thaleen Barnes, Ernie’s second wife, told Hyperallergic. “When we went to places, he watched how people walked, their mannerisms, and how they talked. He was interested in their body, their form and movement. Just looking around the world that we lived in was an inspiration for him to sketch.”
Erin Barnes with a photograph of her father and a selection from her project “Legacy of Color” (photo courtesy Erin Barnes)
Ernie Barnes, “The Sugar Shack” (1976) (© Ernie Barnes Family Trust, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
