Geoffrey Hendricks
Geoffrey Hendricks, an American artist and university professor, internationally recognized for his paintings of sky and his blending of visual and performance art, who made his summer home in Inverness County for more than 50 years, has died.
Hendricks was 86 and had prostate cancer and congestive heart failure. He died May 12th at his home in New York City, with his family at his side.
Hendricks first found his way to Cape Breton in 1954, the year before the Canso Causeway was built. He had just graduated from college and hitchhiked up from Vermont to visit his younger brother, who was attending Carmelita Hinton’s summer camp at Sight Point.
The land and the people of Cape Breton made a strong impact on Hendricks. More than a decade later, in 1964, he and his wife, Bici Forbes Hendricks (now Nye Ffarrabas), returned and purchased a farm in Colindale, north of Port Hood, from Willie and Katie Ann Gillies.
The changing skies over the hilltop farm were an inspiration for Hendricks. He converted part of the barn into a studio, and making paintings of the sky became a central part of his summers. Over the years, the farm also became the site of gatherings and performance events – including a day of dance, music, and art on his 80th birthday.
Charlotte Miller of Mabou, an art editor, remembers that celebration fondly. She first met Hendricks when she was young, because her father, Bill Miller, was one of his art history teachers, and Hendricks was an occasional visitor at their home in Maine. She and Hendricks reconnected through the Inverness County Centre for the Arts years later, and renewed their friendship.
“He was such a sweet guy,” she said.
Hendricks was born in Littleton, N.H., on July 30th, 1931, and grew up in Chicago and on a farm in Marlboro, VT. His parents, Walter and Flora Bishop Hendricks, were the first in their families to go to college and shared a passion for education. His father was an English professor who founded Marlboro College.
Hendricks attended the Putney School in Vermont, founded by Ms. Hinton, and received his B.A. from Amherst College, in Massachusetts. He moved to New York City in 1953 to pursue his studies as an artist. He took art classes at Cooper Union and immersed himself in the New York modern art scene. He also worked teaching art to chronically ill patients at a hospital, which was his alternative to military service, as a Quaker and conscientious objector, during the Korean War. Hendricks later earned an M.A. in art history from Columbia University.
He joined the faculty at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1956, teaching art there until he retired in 2003 from the university’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. He became an influential mentor for generations of art students.
“He was the most respectful educator; thoughtful and kind and generous,” said one former student, Linda Lindroth. “He was the kind of artist whose life reflected love as an integral part of creativity.”
Hendricks also taught at summer art academies in Salzburg, Austria, and Skowhegan, Maine, and won fellowships in Germany and South Africa. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States and Canada, and in Japan, France, Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.
For all his international travel, and his life in the urban bustle of New York City, Hendricks considered Inverness County an essential home base. He and Bici had a daughter, Tyche, and a son, Bracken, and spent every summer with them in Colindale. After the marriage ended, Hendricks continued the tradition, ensuring that his city-born children understood and appreciated rural life and the heritage of their Cape Breton neighbors.
During his boyhood on the Vermont farm, Hendricks had scythed hay, milked cows, and weeded the garden that fed the family through the Great Depression. In Cape Breton he put those skills to work, growing a garden and helping his neighbors make hay. He got involved in butchering and fishing with local farmers, and berry picking and mushrooming with his family. And he treasured the friendships formed over tea in neighbours’ kitchens, and at ceilidhs and the Mabou farmers’ market.
Mabou dairy farmer Mary MacPhee Sutherland, who grew up in Colindale and played with the Hendricks children as a kid, remembers Hendricks as the kind of person who would pitch in where needed.
“I remember one night, we were putting in the hay, trying to beat the rain, and they came over to help out,” she recalled. “They were really good neighbors, caring people. They were people you could rely on.”
Though Hendricks was trained as a painter, in the 1960s he became involved with an experimental art movement known as Fluxus. The group’s members staged performance events meant to challenge the sometimes-pompous art world, and they explored the boundaries between art and everyday life.
Hendricks has described how one summer day in Colindale in 1965 as Bici was hanging laundry on the line, he first noticed that the clothes blocked the sky and then imagined that the sky could be on the clothes, not just behind them. That launched a project of “painting sky on everything,” including laundry, work boots he found in the barn, a shovel and some stones and, later, a billboard on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and his Volkswagen bus. A fellow artist, Dick Higgins, nicknamed him “Cloudsmith,” a name he embraced.
His artwork shows the influence of the farm and the land in Cape Breton in other ways. Hendricks made three-dimensional, sculptural constructions that incorporate watercolor paintings of the sky along with natural materials – such as soil, branches, animal bones, and stones pulled from the rock piles in his Colindale fields – and old farm implements, including saws and wooden ladders.
A signature part of his performance art involved doing headstands. With his head on the ground and his feet in the air, it was a way of reversing the usual place our bodies occupy between earth and sky, causing viewers to rethink their own views and position in the world.
Jeweller Johanna Padelt of Port Hood photographed one of those headstand events on the Hendricks farm. And she shared meals and lively conversation with him and other friends, including late autumn gatherings for American Thanksgiving.
“For health reasons his food preferences were very simple, mainly vegetables and grains, with a tiny glass of wine for the occasion – not at all like the traditional American Thanksgiving fare,” she said.
Some years, she said, Hendricks arrived in early summer to plant his garden, then left for an international teaching gig or exhibition and returned at harvest time to take loads of vegetables back to New York in his station wagon.
“He was such a humble and unassuming man, despite his New York artistic background,” she said. “He would come dressed warmly in hand-knit sweaters and warm scarves, always looking both rugged and dapper…. Cape Breton was certainly a second home, a place of his heart and soul.”
In addition to his children, Tyche Hendricks, of Berkeley, Calif., and Bracken Hendricks, of Bethesda, Md., and his former wife, Nye Ffarrabas, of Brattleboro, Vt., Hendricks is survived by: his spouse, Sur Rodney Sur, of New York, N.Y.; his sister, Hildamarie Hendricks, of Putney, Vt.; his brother Nathaniel, of Ellenville, N.Y.; his brother Jon, of New York, N.Y., and three grandchildren.
