Kerry James Marshall Has Been Producing Large-Format Portrait Paintings of Mostly Black Subjects for Over Thirty Years

PORTRAIT 73 KERRY JAMES MARSHALL Kerry James Marshall has been producing large-format portrait paintings of mostly black subjects for over thirty years. Recently his work has found acclaim among collectors and institutions world- wide, finally getting the recognition it deserves. But is Marshall’s visibility a singular case, or has his success had 72 a larger impact on the history and current trajectory of art by black artists? And PAINTING what does his work tell us about the turbulent and violent 2010s? HISTORY By Arnold J. Kemp There is a permanent cultural anxiety in the art interiors, landscape, grand history painting, nude world. It is an anxiety about definitions: how does figure, and abstraction, often at scales that empha- art – its producers, consumers, and critics – define size his obsession with seeing black figures painted itself within and outside the bounds of identity by black artists on par with the grandeur found in categories? Layered into this anxiety are histories these Euro-American genres. of colonialism, white supremacy, and global capi- Marshall has been exceedingly successful at talism that have in related ways grouped individ- answering this charge. He has received solo exhi- uals into categories that fail to account for the bitions throughout Europe and North America, complexities of people in their historic moment. and his work was included in such prestigious Conversations defining black art, for instance, exhibitions as the Whitney Biennial, the Venice have morphed as discourses and practices have Biennale, two Documentas (1997 and 2007), as been altered, ever so slightly, to account for these well as the Carnegie International. In 2018, Mar- complexities. As a result, we have reached a point shall notably set a $21 million record for a work by where we are looking outside of ourselves in order a living African American artist with a sale at Sothe- to solve the riddle of assessment and marketability by’s of his monumental 1997 painting, Past Times. surrounding what some wrongly suggest is a Past Times reimagines the urban public housing moment of discovery; or worse, an entirely new project as romantic idyll. Placing smartly dressed phenomenon. We look to critics for orientation, black figures at the centre of this work, Marshall yet the soundbites that the market demands of appropriated the language and compositional ele- critics and art historians are clearly not up to the ments of pastoral paintings of the Italian Renais- task. Instead, we might look to an artist such as sance. Gardens, impossibly green grass, trees, cou- Kerry James Marshall, specifically how he has ples holding hands, and children frolicking with managed to paint ways through this field, as a way bluebirds flying overhead are composed to critique of beginning to grapple with this anxiety. the paradoxically modern public housing apart- Born 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, before ment complex looming in the painting’s depiction the Civil Rights Act, and having witnessed the Watts of the Chicago skyline. The compositional and con- rebellion in Los Angeles, Marshall has chronicled ceptual decision-making and rigorous workman- the African American experience and advocated for ship is balanced with the warmth that Marshall © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London black artists for decades. His work references US brings to the subject matter at hand: the artist’s culture and history, chief among them the Civil investigation of African Americans in various states Rights era and Black Power movement. Painting in of repose, engaging in leisurely recreational activ- a realist style, he depicts dark figures that celebrate ities more commonly associated with wealthy sub- black beauty and confront general racial stereo- urbia than Chicago’s urban landscape. types within contemporary American society. After Because of his subject matter, Marshall reading Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, understands the political tension regarding who with its intense description of the invisibility its decides which questions and answers matter in black character experiences, Marshall created a framing the reception of art by black artists. This series of black-on-black paintings. In these works, is often a tension between the powerful and the such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His relatively powerless; or a war over meaning where Former Self (1980), figure and ground are ren- the terms of the debate seem up for grabs. For dered in a flat, unmodulated black that under- example, in a discussion of Marshall’s 1997–98 scores his concern with seeing and not seeing. The series “Souvenir”, a curator recently misrepre- series also sets up an analogy between black as sented the central figure in one of the works as the chromatic and black as racial designation that “the angel of black history”. The curator’s meta- might look like the classical painterly problem of phor missed the mark because the central image inserting a dark subject into dark ground (think – a dark, female figure bearing gold angel wings Black Star 2, 2012 Manet’s Olympia), yet these images move the who attends to a pantheon of cultural and political Acrylic on PVC panel, 185 x 155 cm viewer to further consider what makes a black art- figures who died between 1959 and 1979, includ- ist in the twenty-first century visible and represent- ing Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, able. While visibility and visuality are guiding con- and Martin Luther King, Jr. – is really a black angel- cerns for Marshall, he also interrogates the of-history writ large. That is, while the angel is historical genres of Western painting: portraiture, black this does not mean that she only attends a 74 PORTRAIT KERRY JAMES MARSHALL 75 2014, Acrylic on PVC panels, 212 x 303 cm x 303 Acrylic 212 panels, PVC on 2014, © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London Untitled (Studio), 76 PORTRAIT KERRY JAMES MARSHALL 77 The documented lack of images of black people in major museum Placing smartly dressed black figures at the centre of this work, collections is the cultural landscape in which Marshall has consistently Marshall appropriated the language and compositional inserted his work and point of view for over three decades now. elements of pastoral paintings of the Italian Renaissance. racialised history relegated to the disenfranchised cultural landscape in which Marshall has consist- Marshall was not alone in his pursuit to I have said it so often it could go without saying. I and isolated from the larger project of history. This ently inserted his work and point of view for over simultaneously operate within and transform the have always believed that his work should be seen would be a history that in the US is celebrated widely three decades now. Marshall uses this history to idea of history painting in the US. His 2016 retro- wherever great pictures are collected and made in the month of February and only then. The speci- comment on the lack of representation of African spective shed light on the horribly mutilated con- available to art-loving audiences. He is a true mas- ficity of Marshall’s painting argues rather for a greater American people, and at the same time his work dition of our racialised psyche. Marshall’s show ter of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the goal for its angel: there is in fact healing here. It feels contributes positively to that very history by aug- was, however, preceded by the groundbreaking black body with more elegance and authority. No symptomatic of our anxious times that a Euro-Amer- menting the representation of black people in his group exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los other artist has inspired my own devotion to a ican curator, authorised by powerful institutional paintings. This is not as simple as it may seem. Angeles 1960–1980. Curated by Kellie Jones for the career in image making more than he did. I saw in affiliations, somehow does not get the content right, Marshall first had to accept the political space in Hammer Art Museum in Los Angeles, Now Dig his example the way to greatness.” It seems the performing instead a semantic reversal that dimin- which his work could operate by recognising that This! showcased the work of a number of pioneer- Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute ishes the reading of Marshall’s work. The misreading painting history is what artists ultimately did and ing black artists who, along with other artists of of Chicago were listening to Marshall, as the two solidifies a level of mistrust between black artists and do. The sheer volume, scale, and mastery of paint- varied backgrounds, had a significant impact on institutions organized career retrospectives for art-world elites that covers up Marshall’s greater ambi- erly technique – color, composition, and drawing the artistic practices that developed in Los Angeles White in 2018. tion: to use the genre of history painting to reread the especially – displayed in Marshall’s practice have from the 80s on. Artists pivotal to Marshall’s own Marshall’s current market success would be legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the whole of allowed his work to meaningfully participate in, thinking, such as Senga Nengudi and Charles unthinkable without the influence of Charles White, history in relation to a very complex present. if not transform, a certain narrative of art that White, were highlighted in Now Dig This!. Of White and in addition to his example, other institutions The documented lack of images of black reflects the discriminatory hierarchies of collect- in particular, Marshall has written: “I have been a have been instrumental as well. The Studio Museum people in major museum collections is the ing institutions.

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