Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall
born 1955
American painter, writer, film production designer and multi-media installation artist. Marshall’s works portray idealized subjects derived from African American experience in large-scale, multiple-figure paintings and installations that share many characteristics with European history painting in the “grand manner” of PETER PAUL RUBENS, BENJAMIN WEST, JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID and the 19th-century academic tradition. This “high culture” Euro-American tradition is juxtaposed with elements of African American vernacular culture in order to reinsert African American subjects and aesthetics into the larger mainstream of America’s artistic and cultural history—a history from which, the artist believes, blacks have been largely excluded.
Marshall was born in Birmingham, AL, one of the most segregated cities in the United States at that time, and the site of civil rights demonstrations in the early 1960s. He moved with his parents in 1963 to Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts, CA, just a few years before the riots there. Consequently, the struggles of the civil rights movement profoundly affected him and are a major theme in his mature work.
Marshall studied art at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles while still in high school, and came under the influence of African American social realist painter, Charles White, who was a professor at the Institute. From the older artist, Marshall learned to draw the human figure and was also imbued with a sense of the social responsibilities of artists. Marshall graduated from Otis in 1978. After participation in a number of group shows the artist received a resident fellowship from the Studio Museum in Harlem and in 1987 Marshall and his family settled permanently in Chicago. From 1993 to 2006, he taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
In works from the 1980s, Marshall explored themes of the social and historical “invisibility” of blacks in such paintings as A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self (1980) or La Venus Negra (1984), where the dark figure is barely perceptible against a cooler, black background.
In the 1990s, he expanded his repertoire in a series of genre scenes on a monumental scale, such as De Style (1993), set in a barber shop, or a couple undressing for bed in Could This Be Love? (1992). In Lost Boys (1993), he commemorates innocent children killed in the cross fire of gang violence, combining compositional devices as well as specific details, like the tree of life, derived from Renaissance painting, but juxtaposes these with elements taken from black vernacular culture, like the plastic Kewpie doll in the extreme foreground, used by blacks in rural areas as decorations on the graves of children.
Rarely, if ever, are these references intended to be interpreted ironically, according to the artist, “When you talk about kitsch and commemoration, just go to the cemetery. All those angels, all those urns, there is nothing at all ironic about that.” He expanded on this elegiac mood in his first large installation entitled Mementos (1998), which includes large paintings on unstretched canvas in which black angels with gold glitter wings give homage to John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with a host of deceased black authors, musicians and thinkers, floating in a decorative arrangement that is almost Rococo in spirit. Along with these idealized homages, there is also a video montage showing scenes of gang violence and a funeral, which is viewed through what appear to be holes in a wall of a stone mausoleum, bringing together the idealism of the painting and the reality of the video.
In 2000, Marshall started work on Rhythm Mastr, an ongoing comic book story that mixes urban and Yoruba myths, parts of which were published in serial form in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Drawn in the style of comics and without irony, they are an attempt to insert black superheroes into the medium. In 2003, Marshall put together a multimedia exhibit organized by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics, accompanied by a catalog with essays by Marshall and others in search of defining a unique black, transatlantic aesthetic. In 2005, he was given a mid-career retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre in London. Marshall has also exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta X and the Whitney Biennial.
[source: Dennis Raverty. "Marshall, Kerry James." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2088486.]
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