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| "Watts 1963,"
1995. Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas; 114 x 135 inches. |
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“Watts 1963”
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Marshall's depiction
of Watts circa 1963 is a vision charged with deeply personal memories,
as this is where the then young artist and his family lived for
two years before the 1965 Los Angeles riots. Eight years old when
Marshall's family moved from Birmingham, Alabama (a hotbed of Civil
Rights activity at the time) to Southern California, "Watts" is
a childhood vision tempered by the hindsight and distance that comes
with being an adult. In the painting, massive rays from a lemon-yellow
sun fill the sky, stopping just short of three blue
birds holding aloft a thin white ribbon that reads "HERE WE
REST." The romantic symbolism of a golden sun and bluebirds of happiness
is in sharp contrast to the sentiment of the text, which expresses
a somber, eternal resting, such as would take place at a mortuary
or a tomb. A larger red banner reads"There's more of everyth.."(a
reference to the Alabama state motto), its incomplete message leaving
one ambivalent about what it promises. Palm trees and flowers dot
the painting, and yet it's difficult not to notice that "Nickerson
Gardens" is not really a garden at all, but actually an urban housing
project. Three children, a girl and two boys, stand in the foreground
and represent the artist and his two siblings, their eyes seeming
to inspect the viewer. Their clothing is simple and unadorned in
contrast to the lush landscape around them, the only real spot of
color being the young girl's matching pink flip-flops and hair jewelry.
Each child's body casts a shadow in a different direction, upsetting
traditional perspective and the natural logic behind the sun in
the background. One boy's shadow
seems almost like a black carpet, and we are reminded again of the
ominous sign that floats above. Curled up in a ball and clutching
his stomach, this is not our first indication that something is
terribly wrong. From the oddly arranged shadows to the splotchy
flowers and drips of paint, Marshall questions the utopian innocence
of his childhood home at every pictorial turn.
"Watts" is one of several works from Kerry James Marshall's 1995
"Garden Project" series. Each painting in the series is grand in
scale and lush with colorful, linear imagery reminiscent of illustrations
from a children's book. This visual optimism and dreamlike innocence
is in keeping with the language of social reform prevalent during
the 1960s, where the idea for developing new and improved housing
projects to replace the urban ghettos was spawned. Intended as affordable
housing for a growing population, including GIs returning home from
the Korean War, these housing projects ended up perpetuating the
separate-but-equal mentality that the Civil Rights movement had
worked so hard to eliminate. This mentality, the sole principle
of which was a division by race, had larger economic ramifications
when put into practice by society: lower paying jobs for African-Americans,
a class system closely divided along racial lines, and the genesis
of the modern welfare state itself. As the economy changed, these
institutional housing complexes built by the federal government
became, in the artist's words,"warehouses for poor people." |
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