Kerry James Marshall

Biography

The painting is small, tempera on paper. It is done almost entirely in shades of black: a head-and-shoulders image of a man, and against it a wide white smile with a gap between the teeth. It is called “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980), and Kerry James Marshall’s black figures begin with it. Before that he had made collages. Since 2019 the work has belonged to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Marshall was born on 17 October 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama. As a child he moved with his family to Los Angeles; the move was part of the Great Migration of Black Americans. In 1963 the family settled in the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts, a few years before the race riots. The Black Panthers’ headquarters was nearby, and that proximity, he says, left him with a sense of social responsibility. The geography of his childhood later went straight into his paintings.

While still at school he began drawing the figure with Charles White, the social realist painter, and the lessons continued when Marshall was already at college. White, he recalled, became a friend to him as well as a mentor. Under his influence, Marshall said, he knew from the start that he wanted to make art “about something”, about history, culture, politics, and that all that remained was to master the craft. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1978 at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Later Marshall had a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and since the late 1980s his life and work have been bound up with Chicago.

The black of his figures’ skin is deliberately absolute. Marshall holds that the mechanisms of historical and institutional power in Western art were concentrated in painting, and so he takes on the large format, allegory and the “grand manner” of history painting in order to bring Black protagonists into the great narrative of art history. He usually paints in acrylic on unstretched canvas, combining a rough-edged realism with elements of collage, lettering and patterned backgrounds. Advertising shows almost nothing but white bodies, and he wanted, he says, to break the impression that beauty equals whiteness. In a 1998 interview he explained that Black people occupy space, even the most ordinary space, with a particular style: you can’t just walk down the street, you have to walk with style, with rhythm. It is this leaning towards theatricality that he tries to carry over into painting. I think this is where his odd mix of solemnity and almost conversational ease comes from.

In the early 1990s many works grew out of real history. “The Voyager” (1992) is based on the story of a luxury schooner secretly fitted out to carry slaves: two black figures in a boat, a garland of flowers around the woman’s neck and a skull in the water beneath the ship. In “Untitled (Black Venus)” (1992) the figure almost dissolves into the darkness of the background, while “Untitled (Supermodel)” (1994) shows a Black woman trying to look like the blonde models. In the series “Lost Boys” (1993–1995) very dark adolescents with bright white eyes are painted from the shoulders up among white balls and flowers; the subject, in the artist’s words, is a childhood lost early in the ghetto.

“The Garden Project” consists of five large paintings about public housing projects with paradisal names such as Stateway Gardens or Rockwell Gardens. In “Many Mansions” (1994) everything is in bloom, the trees are neatly clipped and three men are planting flowers, but the buildings behind them look like cardboard scenery, and the figures are frozen almost into stereotypes. In the series “Souvenir” (1997–1998) he paints middle-class living rooms where an angel keeps the memory of civil rights leaders, writers and musicians who were killed or have died; their names and dates of death run along the top of the canvas. “Past Times” (1997) was painted at the same time.

Marshall also draws comics. The hero of “Rythm Mastr” is a Black teenager who gains superpowers through African sculpture and drum rhythms from the gods of the Yoruba pantheon. He wanted children to have heroes of their own, and he wanted African myths not to be treated as dead beside Greek and Norse ones. He came back to the comic twenty years later, at the 2018 Carnegie International.

In 1997 he received a MacArthur Fellowship and took part in documenta X in Kassel, then in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and documenta 12 (2007). From 1993 to 2006 he taught painting at the School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2013 President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The retrospective “Mastry” was shown in 2016–2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “Time” magazine put him on its list of the hundred most influential people of 2017.

That same year, 2017, his mural “Rush More” appeared on the west facade of the Chicago Cultural Center, dedicated to women who created the city’s culture: the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Oprah Winfrey, Sandra Cisneros, Margaret Burroughs and others. When the mayor of Chicago decided in 2018 to sell his painting “Knowledge and Wonder” (1995), which belonged to the city library, so as to rebuild that library with the proceeds, the sale was called off after criticism, including from the artist himself.

For Washington National Cathedral he made his first stained-glass windows, “Now and Forever”. They replaced the 1953 windows honouring the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jackson, which the cathedral had removed in 2017, and were dedicated on 23 September 2023. From 20 September 2025 to 18 January 2026 the Royal Academy of Arts in London showed more than seventy of his works in “The Histories”, his largest exhibition in Europe.