Born in Durham, North Carolina in 1938 at the height of the Jim Crow era, Ernest Eugene Barnes, Jr. (“Ernie”) is known for his paintings depicting Southern life and Black Joy in which he animated the lyricism of the human body at sport, work, and play. Barnes’ characters - stylized and sinuous - were expressive of the soul and spirit of the South described by the Artist as the “spiritual currency of the ghetto.” His neo-mannerist style was influenced by Italian masters and 20th Century American artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Wyeth and Charles White.
For many Americans, Barnes’ paintings are essential in the artistic consciousness of the nation. Following its appearance on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album, I Want You in 1976, the rapturous image of Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack was viewed regularly on television screens across the country in the opening and closing credits of the groundbreaking 1970s television show, Good Times, with other works by Barnes posing as the artistic endeavors of the show’s artist-son, JJ. Although in the ‘70s his name may not have been a household one, the impact of his images on popular culture has led Ernie Barnes to become synonymous with contemporary African American creative expression for multi-generational audiences from all walks of life.
Barnes’ mother worked for a prominent Durham attorney and Board of Education member, Frank L. Fuller, Jr., where she oversaw the household staff. On days when Ernie accompanied her to work, Mr. Fuller encouraged a young Ernie to peruse art books and listen to classical music. Later, he was mentored by his high school masonry teacher, a weightlifting coach and former athlete, who encouraged the emerging talent he observed in Ernie’s drawings. Barnes soon became an accomplished athlete himself and went on to attend North Carolina College in Durham on a full sports scholarship, which allowed him to pursue an arts degree. After graduation, he was drafted by the National Football League and played for the Baltimore Colts, Titans of New York, Denver Broncos, and Canadian Football League from 1959 to 1965.
Although Barnes was ambivalent about his football experiences and hated the violence and physical torment of the sport, he credits his years as an athlete and advice from his college art instructor Ed Wilson that made him understand the importance of painting from his own life experiences. Barnes acknowledged Wilson saying, “He told me to pay attention to what my body felt like in movement. Within that elongation, there’s a feeling, an attitude and expression. I hate to think had I not played sports what my work would look like.”
Shortly after his final football game and with the endorsement of San Diego Chargers owner Barron Hilton, Barnes crashed the 1965 American Football League owners’ meeting in Houston to make a pitch to become the first official painter of a professional sports franchise. New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin was impressed with Barnes as an artist and person and offered to pay him a player’s salary to become the team’s official painter. Sooner after, Werblin financed the transportation of Barnes’ paintings to New York and brought three art critics to view them, who agreed that Barnes was “the most expressive painter of sports since George Bellows.” Soon thereafter in November 1966, Grand Central Art Galleries in New York debuted Barnes’ first solo exhibition, which was critically acclaimed and rapidly sold out.
In the early 1970s, Barnes settled in Los Angeles’ Fairfax district where he became interested in Jewish culture and was impressed with how much the community knew of its history. During the retrospective for Ernie Barnes in 2019 at the California African American Museum, curator Bridget R. Cooks was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times where she described how Barnes “really wished that black people had the same type of cultural education” as the Jewish community.
Later in life, Barnes received two Sports Artist of the Year awards (1984 and 1985) and was commissioned to produce paintings for the Los Angeles Olympic Committee (1984), the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team (1987), the Carolina Panthers football team (1996), and the National Basketball Association (1996).
In response to the Black is Beautiful cultural movement of the 1960s, Barnes created thirty-five paintings comprising his iconic exhibition, Beauty of the Ghetto, which toured major American cities from 1972 to 1979 hosted by dignitaries, athletes, and celebrities. His focus shifted towards the beauty and joy of mid-century Black southern life at a time that dismissed the work of Black artists and when Black culture was not represented in the pictures hanging in public collections. Barnes remarked, “I am providing a pictorial background for an understanding into the aesthetics of Black America. It is not a plea to people to continue to live there (in the ghetto) but for those who feel trapped, it is…a challenge of how beautiful life can be.” With the simple act of instilling his canvases with positivity, earnestness, striving, celebration and pride, Barnes’ depiction of Black life imparted a principled, even defiant, message accessible to all.
Barnes often portrayed his figures with eyes closed, as in the 1972 painting, No Time for Church. He described the symbolism of this expression during a television interview in 1990, “…I began to see, observe, how blind we are to one another’s humanity. Blinded by a lot of things that have, perhaps, initiated feelings in that light. We don’t see into the depths of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. We stop at color quite often. So one of the things we have to be aware of is who we are in order to have the capacity to like others. But when you cannot visualize the offerings of another human being you’re obviously not looking at the human being with open eyes.”
During his lifetime, Barnes’ paintings were collected by athletes, movie stars and musicians, including Harry Belafonte, Burt Lancaster, Eddie Murphy, Diana Ross, Sylvester Stallone, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Withers.
The Sugar Shack took the world by storm when it was acquired at Christie’s auction in May 2022 for $15.3 million, seventy-six times higher than the auction estimate and a testament to the enduring nature of Barnes’ work in our collective memory.
Ernie Barnes died on April 27, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. His ashes were scattered in Durham, North Carolina near the site where his family home once stood, and at the beach in Carmel, California, one of his favorite cities.
Recent solo museum exhibitions of Barnes’ work include Ernie Barnes: Where Music and Soul Live, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2023); Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); and The North Carolina Roots of Artist Ernie Barnes, North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh, North Carolina (2018-2019). His work has been featured in institutional survey exhibitions including Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swiss Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); Dix and the Present, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2023); Scrimmage: Football in American Art from The Civil War to The Present, Figge Museum of Art, Davenport, Iowa and Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio (2017),Visual Voice, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California (2016); and I Got Rhythm: Art & Jazz Since 1920, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (2015).
Barnes’ work is currently held in the permanent collections of the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Pro Football Hall of Fame, Canton, Ohio; Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah; North Carolina Central University Art Museum, Durham, North Carolina; and the American Sport Art Museum and Archives, Daphne, Alabama, among others.