Kerry James Marshall was
born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was educated at the Otis
Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and
an honorary doctorate in 1999. The subject matter of his paintings,
installations, and public projects is often drawn from African-American
popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing:
“You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and
grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters,
and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility.
You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That
determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall.
In his “Souvenir” series of paintings and sculptures,
he pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement with mammoth printing
stamps featuring bold slogans of the era—Black Power!—and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary African-American
citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated
by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert
Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s. In “RYTHM MASTR,” Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting
ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite
that risks losing touch with traditional culture. Marshall’s
work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from
Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles
White. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically black
skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged
from an investigation into the invisibility of blacks in America
and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness.
Marshall believes “you still have to earn your audience’s
attention every time you make something.” The sheer beauty
of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously
formally
rigorous and socially engaged. Marshall lives in Chicago.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York | Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle
Kerry James Marshall on the Art21 blog |
