Kerry James Marshall is an American painter, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, and based in Chicago since 1987. He is known for very large paintings of Black life in the grand formats of European art, with figures painted in a deep, deliberate black.
His best known works are the lakeside picnic Past Times, the Garden Project canvases and the 2023 stained glass windows of Washington National Cathedral.
Museums were slow to hang the pictures he wanted to see, and he has said he wants to fill their walls with Black figures. He started doing it himself, at a scale the old masters would have recognized.
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The painting that made his name hung for years in a convention center. In 1997 an art advisor named Joel Straus bought Past Times for $25,000, acting for the Metropolitan Pier and Exhibition Authority, the Chicago agency that runs McCormick Place. The canvas is thirteen feet wide and shows Black Chicagoans relaxing on the shore of Lake Michigan.
On 16 May 2018 the authority sold it at Sotheby's in New York. The estimate was between eight and twelve million dollars. It sold for 21.1 million with fees, more than four times Marshall's previous auction record, and the buyer turned out to be the rapper Sean Combs. No living African American artist had ever sold for more.
The price is the least strange thing about that picture. Marshall built it out of famous European paintings, on purpose, and he painted its people in a black darker than any skin. How he got there starts in Watts, in Los Angeles.
What You'll Discover
Which teacher he followed.
Why his people are so black.
Which gardens he painted.
Whose pictures he borrowed for one shore.
What he put in place of a skull.
Whose windows he replaced.