Artwork: Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2009, acrylic on PVC, 44 5/8 x 43 1/8 x 3 7/8 in., collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift of Katherine S. Schamberg by exchange, photo by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry makes the final stop on its three-city tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this March after debuting at the MCA Chicago and traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Named the best exhibition of 2016 by The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Telegraph, Hyperallergic, and Crave, Mastry presents a 35-year retrospective of the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of the greatest living painters of our time.
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Marshal’s life traces the course of American history over the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Marshall spent his earliest years deep in the heart of Dixie where Jim Crow laws were enforced with a vengeance. In 1963, his family moved to South Central Los Angeles, where the Watts riots would pop off just two years later.
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While the Civil Rights and Black Power movements took hold of national consciousness, Marshall focused his talents of the depiction of African American identity, experience, and consciousness. As a young artist, Marshall committed himself to painting black figures exclusively, seeking to redress their absence from the canon of Western art. Deftly translating the unique space that Black America holds, Marshall is driven by passion to render what has been erased visible. In doing so, he sets the record straight, restoring to not only America but the to the world what had been taken from it.
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Artwork: Kerry James Marshall, Slow Dance, 1992-93, mixed media and acrylic on canvas, unframed: 75-1/4 x 74-1/4 in., lent by the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago; Purchase, Smart Family Foundation Fund for Contemporary Art, and Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, photograph ©2015 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago