Kerry James Marshall is perhaps most famous for his realistic rendering style, his use of undiluted black for dark skin tones. His artworks feature an effort to “rewrite” the western (especially American) historical art canon in the context of addressing its profound problem of excluding meaningful and respectful depictions of black individuals. Marshall’s paintings often confront and challenge the racial stereotypes associated with black bodies and serve as an attempt to ameliorate this lack of representation. 

He incorporates motifs from the American Civil Rights movement and commentary on the political, social, and again, historical invisibility and exclusion of black people and their relegation to ancillary or fetishized roles and positions when afforded representation at all, but very rarely as a subject with dignity afforded to white counterparts. [1]Silence is Golden is an acrylic on panel painting by Marshall created in 1986. The painting features a matte void of a black man’s silhouette sunk into the deep green of a textured, painterly background, this pitch black interrupted only by an almost monstrous, eerily wide and toothy grin bisected by two fingers shushing the viewer and complemented with a pair of unfocused, drooping eyes. 

This painting, its meaning, and its function are better appreciated with context from the history of Marshall’s artistic career; it was created shortly after the inception of what would become his famous and unusual stylistic choice to depict black individuals with literally black skin. In the 80’s, Marshall began moving away from his earlier investment in collage and abstraction just two years after he left art school into a more realistic style as he began to consider the black figure in American history, art and culture. 




There are several other paintings with similar compositions to Silence is Golden, including The Wonderful One (1986), Invisible Man (1986), and Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum (1981).


 But the start of this series of paintings began in 1981, with A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self. The painting, like in Silence is Golden, contains a silhouette of a black man broken up by a gap-toothed grin and white eyes on a deep grey background, where Marshall’s choice of abstraction, palette, and painterly style evokes the minimalistic quality of 1910’s suprematism. 

A Portrait of the Artist, like Silence is Golden, were works Marshall referred to as “clarifying” in terms of his investigation into the representation of black bodies in art both in the historical and the quotidian contexts; both of the paintings speak “to the invisibility of black folk in society, on museum walls and in positions of power.”[2] Subsequently, almost every aspect of this painting serves to symbolically underline this idea of historical black invisibility.

In a 2001 interview with Marshall, he explains his inspiration for his artistic interpretation of black figures:

I was reading Ralph Ellison's book at the time, 'Invisible Man', and was really struck by his characterization of the condition of invisibility as it relates to black people. This kind of dovetailed with this idea that I had been working on, this presence and absence thing with those earlier drawings. So then I started trying to find a way to get that same sense of presence and absence, but using these black figures. [3]

This presence and absence is deftly depicted via each painting’s figure subject deliberately fading into the background of the respective painting, with Silence is Golden’s figure drowning amidst a sea of green not unlike Laure in Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863); these black figures are visible, but just barely (and certainly not in a way that photocopying would be kind to). Marshall parallels the literal visibility of the figure on the canvas to that of black people historically. Only the specific whiteness of their teeth and eyes distinguish them, perhaps subtly speaking to the western historical preferential inclination towards whiteness. 



But more likely is the stark contrast refers more strongly to minstrelsy and other forms of racial caricatures. Silence is Golden is unsettling to look at, in such a way that gives it the impression it is deliberately so as a critique of these caricatures. Inspired by portrayal like Sambo and “jokes about people being so dark you can’t see them at night unless they’re smiling,” Marshall expressed interest in how to deconstruct and reclaim these negative portrayals of blackness to add complexity and transform it into something that had “achieved an undeniable majesty.” That is, playing with these racist and stereotypical representations “without collapsing completely into stereotype.”[4] This exaggerated, stereotyped image of blackness is a criticism of how black individuality is often removed from the larger context of the western art canon in favor of racist, fictitious representations, if any. The result of Marshall’s experimentation with these characters is this unforgettably uncanny, unsettling stare and a wild grin that in of itself mocks these stereotypes in return via Marshall’s grave and purposeful depiction of them.

The black figure is flanked by a five-sectioned column of abstract motifs stacked up in squares of equal size save for the fifth which is a squashed white rectangle. The first, meanwhile, is a stocky red plus on a white background, followed by a yellow square, a red square, and a square bearing a parquet design in the colors yellow, red, black, and green. 

The colors in this parquet aren’t new to Marshall’s work, seen elsewhere such as in his 2015 painting Still Life with Wedding Portrait or Stono Group (Kato) from 2012, and clearly evoking the palette of the Pan-African flag (also known as the Black Liberation flag) used by the Black Panther movement. Colors themselves are another vehicle through which Kerry James Marshall connects his artwork beyond just potentially its literal subject to black identity, strength, and empowerment.

Characteristic of Marshall’s work, too, is the red cross in the first square of this column, also appearing in a multitude of Marshall’s other works, such as Campfire Girls (1995), and Plunge (1992).  In a 2013 interview for an installation with the National Gallery of Art, Marshall described his use of them as a syncretic symbol of both the Red Cross as well as derivative of Yoruban beliefs (the Yoruban people being one of the most extensively targeted African groups during the Atlantic slave trade). [5] [6]  Some of its meaning is shared with the Red Cross, its hue indicating urgency in times of distress as well as rescue, or aid, but in shape it also operates as a representation of intersection-- in this case, likely referring to this juxtaposition of caricature and reality.

The location of these symbols as shunted off to the side of the composition rather than incorporated into the body of the image itself gives me the impression that despite them being abstractions of these ideas of black empowerment they are also, like the figure fading into the background, a literal representation of the marginalization of black individuals and these positive qualities (such as in the Pan-African flag) that should be attributed to them. They serve to strengthen the overall message of marginalization rather than to be understood isolated from this broader context. 

Silence is Golden is rich in meaning, articulated through symbols, color, and composition cooperating to exemplify the ways in which black marginalization occurs. Marshall’s deft arrangement of these visual communicators results in a painting that serves as an effective satirization of the absence of meaningful depictions of black people in art history through a mockery and deliberate subversion of the few, often degrading instances that do exist, that also acts as an unapologetic assertion of black people’s presence in a history they are chronically excluded from.

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[1] Rodney, Seph. “Kerry James Marshall and the Politics of Visibility.” Hyperallergic, December 16, 2016. https://hyperallergic.com/341588/kerry-james-marshall-and-the-politics-of-visibility/.
[2]  Antwaun Sargent, “Four Decades of Paintings Vibrantly Depict Black Life,” Four Decades of Paintings Vibrantly Depict Black Life (Vice, 2016), https://www.vice.com/en/article/kbnmgw/kerry-james-marshall-four-decades-paintings.
[3] “Kerry James Marshall's Biography,” The HistoryMakers, 2001, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/kerry-james-marshall-39.
[4] Marshall, Kerry James. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self." Western American Literature 36, no. 4 (2002), 117.
[5] Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Charles E. Orser, Current Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Slavery in Latin America (New York, NY: Springer New York, 2015), 138.
[6] “In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall ,” In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall (National Gallery of Art, 2013), https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/exhibitions/pdfs/2013/nga-kjmarshall-brochure.pdf, 4.