Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/witness_civil_rights/

From Brooklyn Museum website: Barkley Hendrick's Lawdy Mama embodies the "black is beautiful" mantra by conferring the awe and reverence once accorded Christian altarpieces on the figure of a beautiful woman crowned with a large, halo-like Afro. Inspired by gilded Greek and Russian icons as well as Renaissance altarpieces he encountered during a 1966 trip to Europe, Hendricks applied metallic gold leaf to a shaped canvas, effectively enshrining his subject.

Barkley L. Hendricks (American, b. 1945). Lawdy Mama, 1969. Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 533⁄4 x 361⁄4 in. (136.5 x 92.1 cm). The Studio Museum in Harlem, Gift of Stuart Liebman, in memory of Joseph B. Liebman, 83.25. © Barkley L. Hendricks. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York