Kerry James Marshall: artist and legacy

Kerry James Marshall

Who is Kerry James Marshall and what brought him into the world of art? Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. He received a BFA (Bachelor of Find Arts) and an honorary doctorate from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In an article published on the Public Broadcast Service web site (www.pbs.org) Marshall is quoted as saying: "You can't be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility."

He added, "You can't move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it." Much of his art was influenced, he explained, by his culture and the communities where he was raised and where he has lived. Birmingham Alabama was the scene of massive civil rights marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963; Marshall was eight years old in Birmingham at that time. The police chief of Birmingham, Bull Conner, ordered that high-pressure fire hoses be used to beat the demonstrators back, and the teeth of attack dogs tore into the bodies of many demonstrators. On September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan set off a bomb outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four little girls.

This is a bit of background into the place where Marshall grew up - and the turbulent times in which he became a young man - which is pertinent information when looking into the background, life and times of Marshall. President John Kennedy sent 3,000 federal troops into Birmingham in 1963, after the violence against the demonstrators and the bombing of churches continued.

He has a series of paintings and sculptures called "Souvenir" in which there are a series of stamps (similar to postage stamps) that have slogans on them like "Black Power!" This series is a tribute to the Civil Rights Movement; also in "Souvenir" there are middle-class living rooms with the ghosts of Dr. King, John Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy (all who were assassinated) are like angels floating around the room, according to the PBS story. It's a surreal painting, but the meaning is very down to earth: many good people have died who supported equal justice for all.

In another of his "series" paintings, called Rhythm Mastr, done in the style of a comic strip, a "stereotypical young black hero is shown battling the nameless bureaucracies that are conspiring to tear down housing" in the boy's neighborhood," according to an article in Art Monthly. The work Rhythm Mastr was painted on newspaper and "was originally displayed in random order on gallery windows" in the U.S., in order to "echo the use of a newspaper as a means of blocking the view into empty buildings," the Art Monthly article explains. The idea of an empty department store building - with the windows blocked out by newspaper - is a metaphor for the blight that is often found in the inner city.

What is the social approach Kerry James Marshall takes when he's creating his art? In an interview with a reporter from the journal Callaloo (Rowell, 1998) artist Marshall was asked if in fact he is reinventing an artistic style in order to present black people in a positive light (offsetting the "maliciously" distorted image of black folks that some American artists present). Marshall replied that yes, "there has been a tradition of negative representation of black people," but there has also been a "counter-tradition" to that negative representation of African-Americans by some black artists. The counter-tradition is an effort, Marshall continued, to "offset the degradation." Both of those artistic representations, he added, wound up being stereotypes that "denied a certain kind of complexity in the way the black image could be represented."

So, by understanding those dynamics, and wishing to make something fresh and real with his own talents as an artist, Marshall said he has attempted to take on the issue of negative representations of black people by depicting images on the "borderline" between negative and positive. In other words, he paints black images that may appear negative, but aren't; and he tries "not to fall into the trap," he continued, of assuming that every time he paints a black person it has to present a "positive kind of picture of him."

Marshall's black figures are very dark black, and there is a purpose behind that. He is painting them as though they are "rhetorical figures" he explains; they are very black because for Marshall, using extreme dark coloring is a way of designating himself, and his African-American community, "in contrast to a white power structure of the country or the white mainstream." Marshall told the interviewer that he enjoys having dialogue about art, and style, and the whole dynamic of creating; but he wants his work to be so "undeniably compelling" that the person viewing his art "can't separate the image that's pictured in it from the way the painting is made."

The artist also talks about a period in recent contemporary history when many black artists wanted to be "part of the mainstream" and to do that, they felt they had to "let go of the black representation" and instead, approach art from a more abstract point-of-view. Marshall added that he believes many black artists did that because there was a kind of stereotype associated with black artists in that the moment he or she presented images of black people, all of a sudden the issue was not art, but "social and political."

Marshall was asked about his well-known painting, called "Dark and Handsome," which has points of light in the face of the person. He said that he makes his images "extreme" because they are "emphatically what they are; they are black figures." And he went on to say that there once was a strong sense of "color consciousness" in the African-American community (and it "still exists in some ways...") that went against the notion that somebody who is "very dark" can also be "very pretty and attractive" at the same time. As to the points of light in the face of the person in his painting: "...those little stars, those little lights you see, kind of hovering around his face - these are sort of points of brilliance where you see the kind of luster, the shine, the sparkle."

The image has a "kind of twinkle in the eye," which Marshall explained was a reference to "gleaming beauty...a twinkling, sparkling kind of beauty."

At article about Marshall in African Arts (Bernard, 2001) reviews the book Kerry James Marshall: Telling Stories: Selected Paintings; the writer of the review begins by saying that "the most notable quality" of Marshall's book is how "successfully" it conveys "Marshall's love of painting." In the book, Marshall "bluntly states" such time-worn questions as "What is Art?" And "What is Beauty?" For his part, Marshall defines beauty thusly: