- Marshall, Kerry James
-
▪ American artistborn 1955, Birmingham, Ala., U.S.African American painter and printmaker whose work examines aspects of black culture in the United States. His unique images extend the grand traditions of history painting and populist vernacular imagery.Educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (B.F.A., 1978), Marshall moved to Chicago in 1987 soon after completing a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City. Beginning in 1993, he taught for several years at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and in 1997 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”Marshall is best known for his richly worked large acrylic paintings on unstretched canvas that investigate many aspects of modern African American vernacular existence. Whether his subject is the neighbourhood barber shop (De Style, 1993) or an ironic look at the promise and reality of contemporary public housing (Better Homes Better Gardens, 1994), his images mix a rough-hewn figural realism with elements of collage, signage, and lively and highly patterned settings. Marshall's images often suggest populist banners, having scrolled ornate texts and figures looking directly at the viewer. Some of Marshall's paintings (Our Town, 1995) are concerned with the often under-represented black middle class, and many employ pictorial strategies derived from self-taught artists. Many of Marshall's paintings make reference to the 1960s, the period of his own youth and the rise of the civil rights movement. His extended Souvenirs series (1997–98) depicts comfortable middle-class interiors. In each painting of the series, an African American figure with wings is accompanied by lists of significant African Americans of the past and, in two cases, by a banner emblazoned “We mourn our loss” and including portraits of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.Additional ReadingKerry James Marshall, Terrie Sultan, and Arthur Jafa, Kerry James Marshall (2000).
* * *
Universalium. 2010.
