Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993
1 2021-11-17T23:23:34+00:00 Denise Johnson 969117131bca6dc972723c62bbb8a3558422ec31 144 2 Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993 plain 2021-11-17T23:25:40+00:00 Denise Johnson 969117131bca6dc972723c62bbb8a3558422ec31This page is referenced by:
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Garrett Bolen's Essay Title
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By: Garrett Bolen
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2021-11-17T23:26:32+00:00
It’s no accident that all of the plastic heads packed into the drawers in his studio depict black people: He has always painted only black figures, at leisure, in love, in extremis and in practically all the forms the genre offers (portraiture, history painting, allegory, fête champêtre, even seascape). “If I didn’t do it, how else were they going to be seen?” he said. “That really was the simple way I thought about it. I had to do it.”[1]
Growing up in Birmingham, Ala., then in Los Angeles, the son of a hospital kitchen worker and a homemaker, he was absolutely gripped by his first exposure to art history books and museums, even though he almost never saw anyone who looked like him on the pages or in the galleries.
“That didn’t strike me as particularly insidious, because I really liked the stuff I was seeing,” he said. “In the Renaissance, artists were driven by the market the same way they are now, and they really weren’t supposed to be making pictures of me. That wasn’t their market.” When he began training to be a painter, he said, “It just seemed to me that, now, there’s space for a lot more stuff to be put in.”
Mr. Marshall, a soft-spoken, professorial man with a salt-and-pepper beard and bifocals hanging around his neck, doesn’t carry himself like a firebrand. But at the same time, he never lets you forget that his obsession with art is not simply about trying to succeed in the art world but about trying to change it, fundamentally. Or at least to poke holes in the dam that succeeding generations might turn into a flood.
“The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act,” he said, especially if it’s established itself “without ever having to accommodate any of the people who have been banging on the door to get in.” (Madeleine Grynsztejn, the Chicago museum’s director, has said: “He is painting for a future United States. The expanded history he is creating for us to see today will be the norm tomorrow.”)[1] Author’s Name, “Article Title” The New York Times, September 19, 2021.
