Artist of the day: Artist of the day, November 4, 2021: Kerry James Marshall, an American painter and professor (#1409)

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Artist of the day, November 4, 2021: Kerry James Marshall, an American painter and professor (#1409)

Kerry James Marshall (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 now lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Kerry James Marshall is a contemporary painter whose work explores the complex effects of the Civil Rights movement on the everyday life on African Americans. Through narrative scenes that draw both from history and the artist’s own life, Marshall delves into obscure moments and objects important to contemporary and past black culture. His work is likewise concerned with the tradition of Western painting, and the notion of mastery, authorship, and the erasure of black bodies throughout art history. Like Kara Walker, Marshall often exaggerates the color of the people in his work making them as black as the pigment will allow, drawing more attention to the surrounding color and content of his paintings. Born in Birmingham, AL, he grew up in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, going on to study at the Otis College of Art and Design. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility,” the artist has said of his upbringing. Marshall has shown with David Zwirner Gallery in New York, and his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis among others. In 2016, his work was the subject of a major retrospective titled “Mastry” that would travel to the MCA Chicago, MOCA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art to widespread critical acclaim. In 2018, Marshall's Past Times (1997) sold for $21.1 million at auction, at the time marking the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living African American artist. Marshall lives and 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 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."

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