Kerry James Marshall: The Complete Story
Kerry James Marshall is the American painter who set out, methodically, to put unmistakably Black figures into the museum canon. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, he painted his way into the old masters' room and held the door open.
His figures are painted in blacks so deep they have their own palette, and they are doing something radical for Western painting: living ordinary life at heroic scale.
Kerry James Marshall at a glance:
1955: born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the years when the city's Black churches were bombing targets; the family moves to Watts, Los Angeles, in 1963.
1978: earns his degree at Otis in Los Angeles, where Charles White, the great draftsman of Black life, becomes his mentor.
1980: paints A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, the small, nearly all-black picture that sets his program.
1997: wins a MacArthur genius grant while painting the Garden Project canvases about Chicago housing projects.
2018: Past Times sells for 21.1 million dollars, a record for a living Black artist, bought by Sean Combs.
Birmingham, Watts, and a plan
Marshall was born in Birmingham in 1955, in segregation's capital, and the family moved to Los Angeles in 1963, to Watts and then South Central. He trained at Otis, where the great draughtsman Charles White taught him, and graduated in 1978 with an unusual ambition for the era: not to overturn the museum, but to enter it, on equal terms, with figures who looked like his neighbours.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self
The program announced itself in 1980 with a small painting of a grinning, nearly invisible black figure on black, part Invisible Man, part manifesto. From then on his people are painted in layered carbon blacks, unmistakably, as he says, emphatically Black, and placed in the grand genres: history painting, pastoral, portrait, the beauty parlour and the barbershop given the square footage of coronations.
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The myth: protest art
Because the subject is race, the work gets filed as protest. Marshall's stated project is stranger and larger: correction of the record.
His Garden Project paintings of 1994 and 1995 set public housing life in idyllic light without irony; De Style of 1993 makes a barbershop into a Renaissance altarpiece. The argument is not against the museum.
It is that the museum's story was incomplete, and he is painting the missing chapters in its own grand language.
Mastry, and the 21 million dollar history painting
His retrospective Mastry toured Chicago, the Met Breuer and Los Angeles through 2016 and 2017 and settled the case critically. 1 million dollars, then the highest auction price for a work by a living African American artist.
He had won a MacArthur Fellowship two decades earlier, in 1997, the year he painted it.
Where to see Kerry James Marshall
The MCA and the Art Institute in Chicago, his home city since 1987, the Met and MoMA in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington all hold major works. He still lives and paints in Chicago.
Rythm Mastr, the comic book
Since 1999 Marshall has been drawing Rythm Mastr, a comic about Black superheroes whose powers come out of Yoruba sculpture and Chicago streets.
He started it after clocking that in the whole history of American comics, the default hero was white and the sidekick was not.
The strip has appeared as museum installations, newspaper pages and decades of episodes. He calls it his longest unfinished work: history painting at newspaper speed.
The Garden Project
In the mid-1990s Marshall painted the Garden Project: large canvases about housing projects in Chicago and Los Angeles that carry the word Gardens in their names. Nickerson Gardens, Wentworth Gardens, Altgeld Gardens.
The pictures hold two truths at once, flower beds and bluebirds over public housing blocks, and refuse to let either cancel the other.
Many Mansions shows three men in white shirts tending flowers beneath an estate sign. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, twenty minutes from the buildings it paints.
The barbershop and the beauty shop
In 1993 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art bought De Style, a barbershop scene eight feet wide, its figures nearly matte black, crowned with haircuts built like sculpture.
The barbershop and the beauty salon are his group portraits: the rooms where, week after week, Black self-invention gets done.
In School of Beauty, School of Culture, from 2012, a warped blonde head floats across the salon floor, an anamorphic trick borrowed from Holbein's Ambassadors. In Holbein it was a skull; here the death's-head is a beauty standard.
The Kerry James Marshall questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Large paintings of Black daily life in the grand formats of Western art history.
Why are his figures so black? A deliberate, layered palette: emphatically Black presence, not shadow or absence.
What is his auction record? Past Times, from 1997, sold for 21.1 million dollars in May 2018.
Where is he from? Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955; raised in Los Angeles; based in Chicago.
Who taught Kerry James Marshall? Charles White, at Otis in Los Angeles. Marshall first found him as a teenager, and has spent a career extending White's insistence that Black figures belong in the grand tradition.
Where does he work? Chicago. He moved there in 1987, taught for years at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and keeps his studio practice on the South Side.
More secrets to unlock
Editing the light in the national church
In 2023 the Washington National Cathedral unveiled its replacement for two stained glass windows that had honoured Confederate generals: new windows designed by Marshall, marchers under the word FAIRNESS, his first work in glass. The painter of the missing chapters now edits the light inside the national church.
