Kerry James Marshall
Encyclopedia
Kerry James Marshall is an artist born in Birmingham, Alabama
. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago
where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago
. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design
.
where he observed the Black Power
and Civil Rights
movements 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 with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
While earning his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he worked under the notable Charles White and Arnold Mesches. At Otis, he developed his realist style after experimenting with large-scale drawings and collage, choosing instead to “mak[e] a meaningful picture that did not have a representational image or a specific story to tell,” over abstraction Thus, Marshall still retains the political content so important to the Civil Rights Movement while painting a narrative through mural-sized pieces.
and art set in an urban environment. Some of his other notable works include the Garden Project, which critiques the glorified names of housing projects that conceal desperate poverty and the Lost Boys series, which examines young black men “lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in literacy.” His first major solo exhibition, which traveled throughout the country, was organized at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
in 1998. His work has been exhibited in many American and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale
(2003) and the Documenta
(1997 and 2007).
He based several of his pieces in the early 1990s on actual events in American history. One such painting, Voyager http://www.corcoran.org/collection/highlights_main_results.asp?ID=59¸ 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.
Marshall explored the concept of black beauty in contrast to Western ideals with his painting La Venus Negra. The figure, this time a nude woman, literally blends into her dark surroundings, her sensuous shape barely discernable. Yet once the viewer looks closely, her curvaceous figure evokes a womanly power only enhanced by the deep black of her skin.
As Marshall admits, he himself “‘had not considered that a black woman could be considered a goddess
of love and beauty,’” but with this painting he proves its possibility. He challenges the classic perception of a goddess as a white woman with long flowing hair, speaking again to the issue of African American identity in the Western world
. This concept has more meaning when looking at the African pattern on the top quarter of the background. With this addition, he references the movement begun during the Harlem Renaissance
to incorporate traditional African aesthetics into African American art. In an attempt to reconcile the African art and Western ideals, Marshall places both in his painting. Thus he highlights the search for a black identity that involves all aspects of their ancestral history and their current situation. Although African Americans may feel connected to two differing cultures, Marshall’s painting of a classically Western figure represented with a new black aesthetic brings the two together, showing that they can live in harmony.
Marshall arranges American-historical tropes to divulge what has been concealed by "master-narratives," which are national myths and perplexities inscribed on mass-cultural surfaces. His work, Visible Means of Support, a diptych
of large-scale paintings by the Chicago-based artist, is on view until 2010 on the walls at each side of the Haas Atrium in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
.
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. Other projects of Marshall’s, namely Garden Project and Souvenir, demonstrate the issues of race in America from the 1960s and 1970s and onward. Marshall’s work is dynamic and consistently relevant, especially to the problem of finding an identity.
Of his Souvenir series, Souvenir III, finished in 1998 acrylic with glitter on unstretched canvas, 108 x 156”, centers on the angel that arbitrates the present with the past. She is an angel of annunciation and the caretaker of the living room’s arrangements. However, in creating a new rhetoric of black people in America, he highlights their differences from conventional white power structures. There is a subtlety to the characters that compels the viewer to look deeper: these figures are directly in opposition to the abstraction black artists felt they had to incorporate in order to become mainstream artists. Marshall calls this incorporation of a strong aesthetic and political commentary a “visual authority” that commands the attention of society
Within Souvenir III, the names of prominent black historical figures and the years of their deaths are featured at the top of the mural-sized painting. Thus, the theme of timelessness emerges: the viewer is in the present ruminating on the legacies of figures who are both civil rights champions and African American artists. The paintings reinforce these symbols of remembrance with the phrases “We Mourn Our Loss” and “In Memory Of”.
Souvenir IV, 1998, acrylic, collage, and glitter on unstretched canvas, 108 x156”, likewise set in a middle-class living room based on Marshall’s family’s living quarters, is realism with a touch of the intangible. Through the painting the viewer is traveling to the Civil Rights era and the painting itself is a postcard that also marks the journey. The entire scene echoes Egyptian rituals of supplying the dead in the afterlife with furnishings and food. Souvenir III and IV are done in the grisaille style, an “old-master narrative painting” technique while Souvenir I and II, 1997 acrylic, paper, collage, and glitter on unstretched canvas, 108 x 120” are done in color. As one examines the backgrounds of the Souvenir series, the viewer realizes the lushness of the settings even within the monochromatic natures of III and IV. A Marshall hallmark is the stamping repeated through a painting, seen here as angel wings surrounding the black leaders, and floral backgrounds, seen here as glittered ornamentation.
The Souvenir series chronicles the loss dealt to American society from the deaths of leaders in politics, literature, arts, and music.
In 2009, Kerry James Marshall began to collaborate with the Chicago-based apparel company Flux Collection, including a forthcoming tee-shirt design featuring a portrait of Scipio Moorehead.
He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York
.
Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Birmingham had a population of 212,237. The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area, in estimate by the U.S...
. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, is a state-funded public research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, near the Chicago Loop...
. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design
Otis College of Art and Design
Otis College of Art and Design is an art and design college in Los Angeles, California.The school's programs, accredited by WASC and National Association of Schools of Art and Design, include four-year BFA degrees in illustration, fine arts, graphic design, architecture, landscape design, interior...
.
Influences
Although he currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, his time spent in Watts, Los Angeles, CaliforniaWatts, Los Angeles, California
Watts is a mostly residential neighborhood in South Los Angeles, California.-History:The area now known as Watts is located on the Rancho La Tajauta Mexican land grant...
where he observed the Black Power
Black Power
Black Power is a political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies. It is used in the movement among people of Black African descent throughout the world, though primarily by African Americans in the United States...
and Civil Rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
movements 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 with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
While earning his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he worked under the notable Charles White and Arnold Mesches. At Otis, he developed his realist style after experimenting with large-scale drawings and collage, choosing instead to “mak[e] a meaningful picture that did not have a representational image or a specific story to tell,” over abstraction Thus, Marshall still retains the political content so important to the Civil Rights Movement while painting a narrative through mural-sized pieces.
Works
Marshall is known for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and other objects that take African-American life and history as their subject matter. His work often deals with the effects of the Civil Rights movement on domestic life, in addition to working with elements of popular culture. One work, "Rythm Mastr", is a superhero comic book based on African mythologyMythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
and art set in an urban environment. Some of his other notable works include the Garden Project, which critiques the glorified names of housing projects that conceal desperate poverty and the Lost Boys series, which examines young black men “lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in literacy.” His first major solo exhibition, which traveled throughout the country, was organized at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in 1998. His work has been exhibited in many American and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
(2003) and the Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
(1997 and 2007).
He based several of his pieces in the early 1990s on actual events in American history. One such painting, Voyager http://www.corcoran.org/collection/highlights_main_results.asp?ID=59¸ painted in 1992 has special pertinence in a discussion of race issues in the United States because Marshall based it on a “luxury schooner
Schooner
A schooner is a type of sailing vessel characterized by the use of fore-and-aft sails on two or more masts with the forward mast being no taller than the rear masts....
…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.
Marshall explored the concept of black beauty in contrast to Western ideals with his painting La Venus Negra. The figure, this time a nude woman, literally blends into her dark surroundings, her sensuous shape barely discernable. Yet once the viewer looks closely, her curvaceous figure evokes a womanly power only enhanced by the deep black of her skin.
As Marshall admits, he himself “‘had not considered that a black woman could be considered a goddess
Goddess
A goddess is a female deity. In some cultures goddesses are associated with Earth, motherhood, love, and the household. In other cultures, goddesses also rule over war, death, and destruction as well as healing....
of love and beauty,’” but with this painting he proves its possibility. He challenges the classic perception of a goddess as a white woman with long flowing hair, speaking again to the issue of African American identity in the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
. This concept has more meaning when looking at the African pattern on the top quarter of the background. With this addition, he references the movement begun during the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
to incorporate traditional African aesthetics into African American art. In an attempt to reconcile the African art and Western ideals, Marshall places both in his painting. Thus he highlights the search for a black identity that involves all aspects of their ancestral history and their current situation. Although African Americans may feel connected to two differing cultures, Marshall’s painting of a classically Western figure represented with a new black aesthetic brings the two together, showing that they can live in harmony.
Marshall arranges American-historical tropes to divulge what has been concealed by "master-narratives," which are national myths and perplexities inscribed on mass-cultural surfaces. His work, Visible Means of Support, a diptych
Diptych
A diptych di "two" + ptychē "fold") is any object with two flat plates attached at a hinge. Devices of this form were quite popular in the ancient world, wax tablets being coated with wax on inner faces, for recording notes and for measuring time and direction.In Late Antiquity, ivory diptychs with...
of large-scale paintings by the Chicago-based artist, is on view until 2010 on the walls at each side of the Haas Atrium in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
.
Marshall’s diptych is at once cartographyCartographyCartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...
, historiographyHistoriographyHistoriography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
, and a penetrating diagnostic that upends the narrative of the United States’ constitutionConstitutionA constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. These rules together make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is...
and founding. The paintings recollect that the basis of American capitalismCapitalismCapitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
is slaverySlaverySlavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
, while also suggesting that our social structures are transformable. They challenge historical accounts, which merely accrue dead habits of perception, and argue for a multidimensional realism with rhetorical force.
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. Other projects of Marshall’s, namely Garden Project and Souvenir, demonstrate the issues of race in America from the 1960s and 1970s and onward. Marshall’s work is dynamic and consistently relevant, especially to the problem of finding an identity.
Of his Souvenir series, Souvenir III, finished in 1998 acrylic with glitter on unstretched canvas, 108 x 156”, centers on the angel that arbitrates the present with the past. She is an angel of annunciation and the caretaker of the living room’s arrangements. However, in creating a new rhetoric of black people in America, he highlights their differences from conventional white power structures. There is a subtlety to the characters that compels the viewer to look deeper: these figures are directly in opposition to the abstraction black artists felt they had to incorporate in order to become mainstream artists. Marshall calls this incorporation of a strong aesthetic and political commentary a “visual authority” that commands the attention of society
Within Souvenir III, the names of prominent black historical figures and the years of their deaths are featured at the top of the mural-sized painting. Thus, the theme of timelessness emerges: the viewer is in the present ruminating on the legacies of figures who are both civil rights champions and African American artists. The paintings reinforce these symbols of remembrance with the phrases “We Mourn Our Loss” and “In Memory Of”.
Souvenir IV, 1998, acrylic, collage, and glitter on unstretched canvas, 108 x156”, likewise set in a middle-class living room based on Marshall’s family’s living quarters, is realism with a touch of the intangible. Through the painting the viewer is traveling to the Civil Rights era and the painting itself is a postcard that also marks the journey. The entire scene echoes Egyptian rituals of supplying the dead in the afterlife with furnishings and food. Souvenir III and IV are done in the grisaille style, an “old-master narrative painting” technique while Souvenir I and II, 1997 acrylic, paper, collage, and glitter on unstretched canvas, 108 x 120” are done in color. As one examines the backgrounds of the Souvenir series, the viewer realizes the lushness of the settings even within the monochromatic natures of III and IV. A Marshall hallmark is the stamping repeated through a painting, seen here as angel wings surrounding the black leaders, and floral backgrounds, seen here as glittered ornamentation.
The Souvenir series chronicles the loss dealt to American society from the deaths of leaders in politics, literature, arts, and music.
In 2009, Kerry James Marshall began to collaborate with the Chicago-based apparel company Flux Collection, including a forthcoming tee-shirt design featuring a portrait of Scipio Moorehead.
Recent Life
Marshall was the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1997. He is married to the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce.He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
External sources
- Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBSPublic Broadcasting ServiceThe Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 1 (2001). - Kerry James Marshall - The History Makers
- Kerry James Marshall at the Miami Art Museum
- http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Images.Kerry-James-Marshall.45.html