Catalog Essay
Kerry James Marshall Catalog Essay
Nicholas Galette
Professor Gerspacher
Introduction to the Visual Arts of the World ART 10000
4 December 2024
Black Lives: Front and Center, The Ten Most Important Paintings of Kerry James Marshall at the Smithsonian Museum, National Gallery of Art.
Kerry James Marshall’s paintings brings back the idea of representation in Western art, finally placing Black figures and subjects FRONT and CENTER.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1965 (Metmuseum 2021). As he was growing up, he would go to museums, which were filled with art about white people by white people. Marshall wanted to become an artist. He became a painter who mastered different genres of painting including landscape, portraiture, still-life, and history painting and who had an understanding of art history (Tomkins). Armed with his upbringing and his knowledge of art history, Marshall decided that his artistic mission would be "to create representations of the black figure that would be ratified in the halls of our institutions” (Dunham, 182-129). As a painter, Kerry James Marshall was able to fulfill this mission and is known for showing viewers Black lives front and center.
His accomplishment in this feat is evident by his commission to create new stained glass windows for the Washington National Cathedral (Jaggi, 1-2). The Cathedral decided to remove windows that highlighted achievements of confederate generals and to replace the images with the historical struggle Black people have faced in the United States post-slavery. In this way, we see front and center, images depicting the history of Black people, which has often been ignored in traditional Western art. In light of this monumental commission in the nation’s capital, it is only fitting that an exhibition showcasing Kerry James Marshall’s important paintings take place. This exhibit, Black Lives: Front and Center, will focus on the ten most important paintings created by Kerry James Marshall, which show the culmination of a young artist’s goal to see art, which included people that looked like him, front and center. These ten paintings teach the viewer that Black figures can be the central images in important artworks.
Marshall stated that while there are black subjects in museums, he felt that the “quality” was lacking (Jaggi, 7-9). As the hope of this exhibit is to show the Black figure front and center, the exhibition proudly starts with Marshall’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980). Marshall’s painting is a portrait of himself. It depicts him in very dark tones. His facial features are almost not visible except for his eyes and teeth. What is also extremely striking about this work is its size. It is only 8” x 6”. Its small size, stark black and white paint immediately draw your attention to it. While Black people have been left out of art in the past, this small painting draws you immediately, and helps fulfill Marshall’s goal to make Black figures in art, front and center. About this work, Marshall stated, “There’s a joke about people being so black that you can’t see them at night unless they’re smiling. Being Black was a negative and for me this was the starting point from which I could build an image of Blackness without those negative associations,” (Tomkins, 12-14). Another deeper aspect of this tiny work, is the skill involved. For example, Marshall used egg tempera, which he mixed based on a formula by Italian artist Cennino Cennini from the 15th century (Tomkins, 13-15). Because egg tempera dries very quickly, Marshall had to be very deliberate in his approach to this painting. Marshall said about his portrait that “every single shape you see in it was calculated in a way that exercises a certain force against the edges. The angle and the crease of the hat, the location of the shirt, the gap in the teeth, all those things lined up on vectors that either stabilize or add tension to the direction those shapes are going in —- it’s plotted like a mathematical equation,” (Tomkins, 15).
Marshall’s other goal in painting was to create large scale images of Black figures, because “when I was growing up, I didn’t see a painting of black figures 20ft by 15 ft” (Jaggi, 7-9). With this exhibit, we are immersed in a world where the Black figure is shown in large scale paintings that also depict idyllic images. One monumental work where this is evident is Marshall’s Our Town, which is 9’ x 13’ in scale. In Our Town, we see an image of a Black children playing in the suburbs. This is not the typical image that we see in Western art and it shows us that Black figures also belong in this type of narrative and also belong front and center as the two people in this painting are. The title of the work is from the title of the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, which is a play about a suburban town (Crystal Bridges).
In line with this idea of representation, not only in art, but also in American life, Marshall’s other monumental work is Past Times. Past Times, is one of Marshall’s most known works. Here, we see a Black family in a park doing the typical activities we may see in a Norman Rockwell work. Black figures are picnicking; they are boating; they are playing cricket; they are golfing; and they are enjoying park life. We do not often see this type of representation of Black figures. But Marshall wants us to see more as well. He stated, “We tend to assume there is one history of America: the mythical, heroic narrative of an all-inclusive, grand project that had at its inception the goal of embracing differences and treating all as equal. If we allow ourselves to be lost in this mythology, we overlook the more disturbing, less humane dimensions of our history” (Cantor, 1). Marshall wants us to see that Western art has not been necessarily inclusive. He wants to and did change this approach with his work.
With his body of work, Kerry James Marshall has been able to do what his life goal was, which is to create bold, big paintings of Black figures. He shows Black life in ways that have not been seen before in Western art. His work is colorful, thoughtful and steeped in technical brilliance. He uses his deep knowledge of art and art history in every part of his canvases. Black Lives: Front and Center, which show cases 10 of Marshall’s most important works, shows his contributions to contemporary art and also shows us that Black figures belong in paintings and in art history, FRONT and CENTER.
Works Cited
“Art, Black History, and More with (Free) Virtual Gallery Tours | Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art.” 2021. Crystalbridges.org. February 12, 2021. https://crystalbridges.org/
blog/art-black-history-and-more-with-free-virtual-gallery-tours/.
Betsky, Aaron.“The Affection and Dread in Kerry James Marshall’s Depiction of Housing
Projects.” Architect. March 11, 2017. https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/
exhibits-books-etc/the-affection-and-dread-in-kerry-james-marshalls-depiction-of-
housing-projects_o.
Cantor, Giovanni. “Join the Norman Rockwell Conversation at Denver Art Museum.”
Denverartmuseum.org. July 21, 2020. https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/blog/join-
norman-rockwell-conversation.
Dunham, Carroll. “The Marshall Plan, Carroll Dunham on Kerry James Marshall’s ‘Mastry.’”
Artforum. January 2017: pp. 182-189, illustrated.
Jaggi, Maya, “Artist Kerry James Marshall: ‘Pictures Don’t Do Anything. People Do Things.”
Financial Times, October 7, 2023, www.ft.com. https://www.ft.com/content/
4206d89e-6213-4471-80e9-5fb0dd724834.
Tomkins, Calvin. “The Epic Style of Kerry James Marshall.” The New Yorker, August 2, 2021.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-epic-style-of-kerry-james-
marshall.
Mercer, Kobena. 2019. “Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life.” Afterall: A
Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 48 (September): 38–51. https://doi.org/
10.1086/706126.
2021. Metmuseum.org. 2021. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/
kerry-james-marshall.