Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall is an influential African American artist known for his significant contributions to contemporary art, particularly in addressing themes of Black identity and representation. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Los Angeles, Marshall's early experiences during pivotal moments in the civil rights movement deeply informed his artistic vision. His work often challenges the exclusion of Black figures in the narrative of Western art history, highlighting the importance of representation and the complexities of Black existence.
Marshall initially focused on drawing but later transitioned to a diverse range of media, including painting, photography, and mixed media, allowing him to explore and express his ideas more effectively. His notable works, such as "Lost Boys" and "Mementos," reflect his sensitivity to the nuances of Black life and history. Throughout his career, he has received considerable recognition, including a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, and his exhibitions have been featured in prestigious venues worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art and the Venice Biennale.
Through his innovative approach and political engagement, Marshall has emerged as a leading voice in contemporary art, advocating for a richer understanding of Black narratives. His commitment to mastering various artistic mediums underscores his belief in the power of art as a vehicle for storytelling and social change.
Kerry James Marshall
Fine Artist
- Born: October 17, 1955
- Birthplace: Birmingham, Alabama
Artist
Marshall is a postmodern artist whose work depicts Black American urban life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many of his artworks, which comprise a wide range of materials and media, refer specifically to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Area of achievement: Art and photography
Early Life
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the same year that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, Kerry James Marshall traveled through the geographic history of the civil rights movement. At the age of eight in 1963 he moved with his family to the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in the Watts district of Los Angeles, California. He witnessed the Watts riot of 1965. The family later moved to South Central Los Angeles. Marshall’s junior high school sat about five blocks from the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, and he observed the police using the school's athletic field as a staging area during a 1969 shootout with the Panthers.
Obsessed with art from a young age, Marshall spent hours in the library in Los Angeles looking at pictures of old-master paintings. Like many of his art-world peers, he watched John Nagy's Learn to Draw program on television. Marshall first visited a museum when his elementary school class went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Overwhelmed by all the pieces, he returned frequently to the museum to study Assyrian sculpture, Japanese art, and everything else that he saw. In 1972 Marshall enrolled in an adult painting class on Saturdays at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. After graduating from high school in 1973, Marshall completed two years at Los Angeles City College and transferred to Otis. Charles White, a noted Black artist who taught at Otis, heavily influenced Marshall. The younger man admired White’s perfect draftsmanship and his ability to depict emotion through precisely rendered drawings. When Marshall earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1978, he intended to emulate White by focusing on figure and still-life drawings.
Life’s Work
Marshall abandoned drawing about the same time that he graduated, when an onrush of new ideas outpaced the deliberateness of his chosen medium. The medium became a centrally important concept to Marshall and his artistic process. He did not draw simply because he could but rather because drawing suited the ideas that he wanted to express. When drawing no longer sufficed, Marshall turned to painting, photography, video, film, and mixed media. He first produced a series of abstract collages, exploring surface, composition, and color in small works on paper such as Yellow Quarters (1979) and Permanent Pigments (1979). Almost all of the collages were politically or socially oriented.
Black writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois have explored the disconnect between Black Americans' public and private identities. Marshall's art also engages this theme. He was very conscious of the way that he rendered figures. Sensing resistance in the Black community to extreme representations of Blackness, Marshall imbues his figures with subtlety and grace. His Lost Boys (1993–1995), a collection of pictures of young children killed before they had a chance to grow up, reflects this style. Mementos (1998) focuses on the 1960s and the themes of remembrance, loss, and commemorative souvenirs. Large interior scenes incorporate paint, glitter, collage, photo-screenprinting, and linoleum-block printing on unstretched canvas. Five large panel paintings reproduce a banner with pictures of the three famous martyrs of the 1960s: Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy.
Marshall, who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 1997, had his first major solo exhibition in 1998 in Chicago. At the time, he taught art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His 1999 comic, Rythm Mastr, explored how mythology can give objects new life in contemporary popular culture. The graphic novel focuses on a group of teenagers in an urban Black neighborhood who deal with extreme lawlessness. By the twenty-first century, Marshall had expanded into designing T-shirts in conjunction with an apparel company, Flux Collection.
By the 2010s Marshall was widely acknowledged as a leading artistic voice in exploring Black identity. He had numerous successful solo exhibitions around the world, including the traveling European show Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, the 2013 display Kerry James Marshall: In the Tower at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and a feature at the 2015 Venice Biennale. His work was included in the collections of many prominent museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; LACMA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA); the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Gallery of Art.
In 2021, Marshall joined more than two dozen other MacArthur Fellows in the exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 in Chicago. The multisite exhibition, which officially opened on July 15 and runs through December 19, explores the theme of “the commons.”
Significance
Marshall’s work attacks clichés attached to race and emphasizes the exclusion of Black figures and imagery from the history of Western art. He is a highly political artist who explores the notion of representation and how it shapes the way in which people view the world. At the same time, Marshall attacks the notion that art cannot be easily defined. He strove to master every medium in order to tell stories about the Black past and present, and he valued the process of making art as much as the end product.
Bibliography
Douglas, Sarah. "The Painter of Modern Life: Kerry James Marshall Aims to Get More Images of Black Figures into Museums." ART News. ARTnews, 2 Mar. 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.
"Kerry James Marshall." Jack Shainman Gallery. Jack Shainman Gallery, 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.
Marshall, Kerry James, et al. Kerry James Marshall. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Print.
Loos, Ted. "Genius at Work: 29 MacArthur Fellows Show Their Art in Chicago." The New York Times, 13 July 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/arts/design/macarthur-fellows-art-show-chicago.html. Accessed 22 July 2021.
Sultan, Terri, ed. Kerry James Marshall: Telling Stories, Selected Paintings. Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994. Print.
Tani, Ellen. "The World of Groundbreaking Artist Kerry James Marshall." Artsy. Artsy, 21 Apr. 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.
Williams, Eliza. “Kerry James Marshall.” Art Monthly 293 (February, 2006): 33–34. Print.
Wolff, Rachel. “Kerry James Marshall.” ArtNews 107(September, 2008): 146–148. Print.