Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois.
A retrospective exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2016.
Early life and education
Marshall was born October 17, 1955, in Birmingham, Alabama. He was raised in Birmingham and later in Los Angeles, California. He is the son of a postal worker and a homemaker. His father's hobby was buying broken watches that he would pick up in pawn shops for a song, figure out how to fix them with the help of books he would find, before reselling the watches. Marshall was able to learn to deconstruct items that he saw as rarefied and complex, making them his own.
His home in Los Angeles was near the Black Panther Party's headquarters, which left him with a feeling of social responsibility and influenced his work directly.
The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is drawn from African-American culture and rooted in the geography of his upbringing. In 1963 he moved with his family to the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in the Watts district of Los Angeles, just a few years before the race riots began.
Education
In high school, Marshall began figure drawing under the mentorship of social realist painter Charles White, which continued on into Marshall's college career. He stated that during the years of his training, White "became as much as a friend as a mentor; I kept in touch with his family, even after his death." While studying at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Marshall worked to "not have a representational image or a specific story to tell," over abstraction. Marshall earned a B.F.A. degree in 1978 from Otis College of Art and Design.
Career
Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. He was a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the School of Art and Design from 1993 until 2006. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama, one of seven new appointees chosen.
Hank Willis Thomas has claimed that Marshall was a big influence on him and his practice.
Work influence, social views and themes
Marshall's childhood time spent in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, where the Black Power and Civil Rights movements happened, had a significant impact on his paintings. Strongly influenced by his experiences as a young man, he developed a signature style during his early years as an artist that involved the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African Americans, specifically black men with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s and still appears in his most recent works. Marshall is known for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and other objects that take African-American life and history as their subject matter. In a 1998 interview with Bomb Magazine, Marshall observed,"Black people occupy a space, even mundane spaces, in the most fascinating ways. Style is such an integral part of what black people do that just walking is not a simple thing. You've got to walk with style. You've got to talk with a certain rhythm; you've got to do things with some flair. And so in the paintings I try to enact that same tendency toward the theatrical that seems to be so integral a part of the black cultural body."Marshall believes that the gears of historical and institutional power in Western art resided primarily in painting. When he studied at Otis, he was fascinated by the work of Bill Traylor, the self-taught artist who was born into slavery in Alabama, which inspired him to create more artwork relating to old-timey, grinning racial trope.