Kerry James Marshall

One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics

Branching beyond painting Kerry James Marshall has created over 40 new works in the mediums of photography, sculpture, video, and even comic art. But it ’s the stories of African American life that has made Kerry James Marshall an international star. Collectors pay over $100,000 per work. His artwork hangs in over thirty museums across the country, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Art and of course the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Kerry James Marshall uses the styles of classical and history painting as templates to elevate the dreams, trials and tribulations of the urban poor within the archive of Western art history. He takes the stories of the African American working class and places them in the company of angels, gods and kings in the manner of David, Michelangelo, and Ingres. In CS magazine Marshall states “... one of the things I did was to take black figures and insert them into a kind of canonical, classic format at a scale that was comparable to grand narrative painting. My project was to synthesize vernacular, folk traditions of painting and representation, the classical frame, and modernist painting gestures, and have the Black figure be central to that but not so narratively bound that you couldn’t first acknowledge the primacy of painting. ”While his methods may be complicated, his principals are very simple.Marshall converts an absence of human qualities into a phantasm of African Americans, in other words, he converts a social problem into an aesthetic problem.He discovered his motif of superblack figures after reading Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, of which the absence of humanity in Ellison ’s characters–Marshall created the series “Invisible Men ”to equate the color value Black with sexuality and virile power against lush floral designs formed with gestural abstract expressionist strokes. Marshall paints the men as superblack, darker than any actual Black person could ever be, this side of the grave, but without personalizing details; because his concern in his painting and in society is the role of blackness as a destabilizing element that must be balanced in the whole composition. One might say that the composition of a problematic figure in an artwork is Marshall’s analogy for the inclusion of Blacks in the organization of society.

James Kerry Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama.His family left Alabama just before the infamous bombing at the 16 Street Baptist Church that killed four teenage girls. His family migrated to Los Angeles were they lived in a housing project two blocks from the L.A.Panthers headquarters, and he survived the Watts Rebellion. Mr.Marshall has also lived in Chicago for over sixteen years, watching the explosive growth of Bronzeville ’s African American middle class. Let ’s just say he knows the terrain of the African American community from a variety of perspectives. Cheryl Lynn Bruce, his wife and a successful actress, observed in Chicago Magazine: “It ’s things that he ’s observed in the neighborhood... elements as arcane as life underneath the el... the public housing building that towers above our home...”

The theme public housing and the lives of the people that inhabit it tower over Mr.Marshall ’s works. In 1990 he created the “Invisible Men ”series. In 1993 he created the well-received “Lost Boys ” series based on J.M.Barrie ’s Peter Pan, about the social destruction of Black males by their allurement to false values. In 1994 “Garden Project,”a series on the theme of Public housing that highlighted the futility of governmental attempts at beautification and reform. He received his BFA from Otis Art Institute in 1978 where he studied with the legendary Charles White who taught him his most important lesson: art has to matter to people.

“One True Thing, ”Kerry James Marshall ’s new show, running February 3rd thru April 24, 2005 at the Birmingham Museum of Art, explores the question raised during the Black Arts Movement of the seventies:Can Africa and African American culture be drawn upon as sources and models for art and identity? In “One True Thing, ”instead of enhancing Black themes with flourishes from art history, Marshall reverses his technique; he uses objects from the everyday life or historical past African American cultures, giving them artistic duties.This is a homey, African American friendly show. Cameo medallions, bottle trees, black light, home videos, and church signs, are used as sculptures and installations. Don’t you remember cameo medallions on your grandmother’s dresser?

In the installation “First ”a series of cameo medallions commemorate great African Americans of the past. The series features Kerry James Marshall himself portraying William Tucker, the first child born of African Slaves in Colonial America in 1624. In “Heirloom and Accessories ”cameo medallions reveal how racist sentiment is transmitted from generation to generation.In Africa Restored and other African theme sculptures, cameo medallions areadded to sculptures of Africa, revealing different White and Black relationships to the continent. Marshall converted the simple cameo medallion into an artistic tool for exploring history and identity.He did the same with all the everyday elements that appear in the show.

Yes, there are great paintings, “Black Painting ” perfects the work he started with Invisible Men by painting a Black figure on Black background. The variations in darkness between the figure and the background can make the figure disappear when the painting is viewed from certain angles.In “One True Thing, ”there is something you can identify with.