Kerry James Marshall 1955-
By Aliza Wall
Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20.3 x 16.5 cm., MCA Chicago, https://www.artsy.net/artwork/kerry-james-marshall-a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-shadow-of-his-former-self.
Born October 17, 1955, in Birmingham, Alabama, painter Kerry James Marshall consistently subverts and questions the exclusionary nature of the Western art historical canon. From a young age, Marshall was acutely aware of and impacted by the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, a theme that would feature prominently in his mature work. In 1963, Marshall moved to Watts, California where the Watts Riot would take place soon after. During high school, Marshall began his studies at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. There, he came under the influence of prominent African American social realist painter, Charles White. From White, Marshall gained both technical knowledge and a sense of social responsibility. Marshall also sites the Old Masters as major influences and attributes his love of art-making to them. This interest in the canonical paired with Marshall’s experience as an African American man growing up during the Civil Rights Movement combined to create his distinctive mature style. Marshall graduated from the Otis Art Institute in 1978.
Marshall’s works from the 1980s are characterized by an exploration of the social and historical “invisibility” of Black people in art history. This is perhaps best seen in Marshall’s 1980 self-portrait, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. In Marshall’s own words, this painting addresses the “lack of Black figures in…the pantheon of important artworks.” It draws inspiration from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man which discusses the social and psychological exclusion or invisibility of Black individuals in the twentieth century. This notion of invisibility is also addressed in La Venus Negra (1984) which replaces Botticelli’s Venus with a Black figure who is obscured almost entirely by a Black background.
During the 1990’s Marshall’s oeuvre expanded to include genre paintings that combine everyday themes with the scale and visual language of traditional history paintings. De Style (1993) deftly evokes De Stijl both in name and in style, the barbershop scene painted with Mondrian’s primary colours. Like Dutch Masters, Marshall monumentalizes the everyday, imbuing the figures in the barbershop with a sense of dignity and presence. Marshall also reclaimed the portrait as a legitimate site for Black representation in (Self Portrait) Supermodel (1994). This piece depicts Marshall wearing a long blonde wig, surrounded by the names of white 90’s supermodels. Placing a Black figure in a traditional portrait painting and aligning it with the fashion/beauty industry problematizes discourses that align beauty with whiteness. By placing a Black figure in the white-dominated space of portraiture, Marshall asserts that Black people, like their white counterparts, can have a kind of “ordinary grace.”
In 2000, Marshall started work Rhythm Mastr, a comic book story that mixes urban and Yoruba myths to create the Black superheroes he lacked as a child. In Rhythm Mastr, Marshall models the setting on his current hometown of Chicago, continuing his earlier interest in the elevation of the everyday to the monumental. From 2010 onwards, Marshall executed more monumental genre scenes of daily life alongside a series of large brightly coloured abstract pieces. In 2016, a retrospective exhibition was organized by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art which included both Marshall’s paintings and classical works that inspired his practice. Despite his classical inspirations, Marshall does not copy the canon but deftly appropriates it to create art that begins to remedy hundreds of years of exclusion, degradation and objectification. Marshall continues to work today.
Bibliography
Laster, Paul. “Kerry James Marshall: ‘My love of art making came from Leonardo and Michelangelo’ (An Interview).” Conceptual Fine Arts. December 2, 2016. https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2016/12/02/kerry-james-marshall-at-the-met-my-love-of-art-making-came-from-leonardo-and-michelangelo-an-interview/.
Raverty, Dennis. “Marshall, Kerry James.” Grove Art Online. December 10, 2018. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7002088486?rskey=Sx9Imr&result=1.
Tani, Ellen. “The World of Groundbreaking Artist Kerry James Marshall.” Artsy. April 20, 2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-kerry-james-marshall-became-a-superhero-for-chicago-s-housing-projects.
“Untitled (Self-Portrait) Supermodel.” Sotheby’s. Accessed October 13, 2019. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2019/contemporary-curated-n10116/lot.206.html