Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois.
A retrospective exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2016.
Early life and education Marshall was born October 17, 1955, in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. He was raised in Birmingham and later moved to Los Angeles, California, as part of the Great Migration. He is the son of a postal worker and a homemaker. His father's hobby was buying broken watches that he would inexpensively acquire in pawnshops and learn how to fix them with the help of books, before reselling the watches.
Marshall's home in Los Angeles was near the Black Panther Party's headquarters, which left him with a feeling of social responsibility and influenced his work directly.
The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is drawn from African-American culture and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing. In 1963, he moved with his family to the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in the Watts district of Los Angeles, just a few years before the race riots began.
Education In high school, Marshall began figure drawing under the mentorship of social realist painter Charles White, which continued on into Marshall's college career. He stated that during the years of his training, White "became as much as a friend as a mentor; I kept in touch with his family, even after his death." While studying at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Marshall worked to "not have a representational image or a specific story to tell" over abstraction. Marshall earned a B.F.A. degree in 1978 from Otis College of Art and Design.
Career In 1992, art dealer Jack Shainman approached Marshall after seeing his exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. He spent a year persuading Marshall to mount a show in SoHo. Although the exhibition did not receive the level of attention Shainman had expected—resulting in the sale of only three paintings at $7,000 each—he continued to place Marshall’s work in a range of venues, including museums. This sustained exposure led to significant critical recognition, and in 2018 Marshall’s painting Past Times sold for $21.1 million at Sotheby’s.
Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. He was a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the School of Art and Design from 1993 until 2006. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama, one of seven new appointees chosen.
Conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas has said that Marshall was a big influence on him and his practice.
Work influence, social views and themes
Marshall's childhood time spent in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, where the Black Power and Civil Rights movements happened, had a significant impact on his paintings. Strongly influenced by his experiences as a young man, he developed a signature style during his early years as an artist that involved the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African Americans, specifically black men with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society.Sultan, Terrie. "This is the Way We Live". Kerry James Marshall. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. . This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, and still appears in his most recent works. Marshall is known for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and other objects that take African-American life and history as their subject matter. In a 1998 interview with Bomb Magazine, Marshall observed:"Black people occupy a space, even mundane spaces, in the most fascinating ways. Style is such an integral part of what black people do that just walking is not a simple thing. You've got to walk with style. You've got to talk with a certain rhythm; you've got to do things with some flair. And so in the paintings I try to enact that same tendency toward the theatrical that seems to be so integral a part of the black cultural body."Marshall believes that the gears of historical and institutional power in Western art resided primarily in painting. When he studied at Otis, he was fascinated by the work of Bill Traylor, the self-taught artist who was born into enslavement in Alabama, which inspired Marshall to create more artwork relating to depiction of "a kind of old-timey, grinning racial trope".
Marshall is one of the members of the contemporary artists of color such as Mickalene Thomas, Howardena Pindell, Charlene Teters, and Fred Wilson, who often incorporated the issue of race into their work. Marshall's work is steeped in black history and black popular culture embracing blackness as a signifier of difference to critically address the marginalization of blacks in the visual sphere, utilizing a wide range of styles. His artworks are identity-based; specifically, he made black aesthetics visible and brought the black aesthetic into the fold of the grand narrative of art. In his own words, he uses blackness to amplify the difference as an oppositional force, both aesthetically and philosophically. One such "black" issue Marshall takes up is that of beauty. He stated that since most figures in advertising are white, he wanted to produce images of black bodies to "offset the impression that beauty is synonymous with whiteness" "Black is beautiful" was one of the Black Arts movement's slogans to counter the prevailing view that blackness was inherently unattractive. Marshall directly appropriates the slogan in some of his works by utilizing language. Along with "Black is beautiful", he wanted to create an epic narrative in his paintings in the "grand manner". His focus was to create new works of art that were not a part of the western art-historical tradition.
Most of Marshall's painting engages allegory and symbolism. Most of his work's subject matter relates to the iniquities of colonial regimes. Marshall is best known for his richly designed large acrylic paintings on unstretched canvas. His works combined rough-hewn realism with elements of collage, signage, with lively and highly patterned settings. His images often suggest populist banners. Viewers often will see ornate texts and figures looking directly into them. Some of his works often are under-represented black middle class and many employ pictorial strategies. His artworks are closely related to the Black Arts movement. Through exploring the theme of being black in America, Marshall's work also explores race in context with the "Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, housing projects, black beauty, and the political and social invisibility of blacks". Marshall's work was heavily influenced by his upbringing in Alabama in the 1950s and Los Angeles in the 1960s. His works were always based on the experience of being black in America during these time periods.
Marshall created comic strips, such as Rhythm Mastr, a story of an African-American teenager who gained superpowers through African sculptures using drum patterns. Specifically, the powers are derived from the seven gods that make up the Yoruba pantheon. Marshall chose this to address the differences in how African and Western mythologies, such as Greek and Norse, are represented. Whereas the latter remain culturally significant with a level of currency to them, Marshall believes that the former has been forgotten - being treated as "either dead or obsolete". Marshall was concerned with the lack of African-American heroes kids could look up to while growing up. He revisited the Comic 20 years after its debut at the 2018 Carnegie International. When questioned about the presence of Marvel's Black Panther as a Black comic book hero, Marshall retorted with the fact that he was still created by white writers and therefore not representative of black culture. Other comics included P-Van, which was inspired by some guys who would sit in a Van outside Marshall's studio and just "hang out", and On the Stroll, which was based on neighborhood prostitutes with Marshall taking them out of that context and humanizing them. He was one of the many African-American artists who tried to incorporate themes of race and being black into his works, hoping to diversify the art historical canon. Some of his works, such as La Venus Negra and Voyager, combine African aesthetics with Western traditions, showing the struggle of African Americans to find their place in American society. Oftentimes Marshall's works were perceived to be full of emotion portraying what it was like being an Urban African American, displaying middle-class African-American homes and families. Other projects of Marshall's, namely The Garden Project and Souvenir, demonstrate the issues of race in America from the 1960s and 1970s and onward. The Garden Project also critiques the glorified names of housing projects that conceal desperate poverty,"Kerry James Marshall Biography". Chicago, 2001. ArtMakers. The History Makers. November 16, 2009. while the Lost Boys series examines young black men "lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in illiteracy."Rowell, Charles H., and Kerry James Marshall, "An Interview with Kerry James Marshall" , Callaloo 21.1 (1998): 263–72. Marshall's work is dynamic and consistently relevant, especially to the problem of finding an identity.
Marshall reflected: "Under Charles White's influence I always knew that I wanted to make work that was about something: history, culture, politics, social issues. … It was just a matter of mastering the skills to actually do it."
Work
Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) The painting Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) was a departure for Marshall, and was the first painting he made of a Black figure. Prior to this work, Marshall was working in collage. It is a small painting, made with egg tempera on paper. It was created primarily in shades of black and depicts the bust of a black man with a large white smile and gapped teeth. Since 2019, this painting is housed in the collection at Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art (LACMA).
Voyager (1992)
Marshall based several of his pieces in the early 1990s on actual events in American history. One such painting,Voyager, painted in 1992, has special pertinence in a discussion of race issues in the United States because Marshall based it on a "luxury schooner ... secretly outfitted to carry African slaves". Symbols of this representation abound, from the two black figures in the boat and the flowers draped around the woman's neck to the contrast between the light and airy clouds and the darkness of the upper background. A skull lies in the water, just beneath the ship, hinting at the doomed future of the Africans, and the unknown woman has an expression of uneasiness. He thus brings to the forefront the irony of a ship with a beautiful, high-class appearance and a dark secret purpose, forcing people to think about something they would rather forget.
Black beauty, Untitled (La Venus Negra) (1992) and Untitled (Supermodel) (1994)