Kerry James Marshall

In recent years, evidence has emerged that suggests women may have participated in academies more than we realized, which really begs the question, were women excluded from being great artists or just written out and written off? Centuries later, artists continue to explore the myth of the great artist and how it shapes culture.

Like here's Kerry James Marshall's Untitled Painter from 2009, which depicts a black artist in front of her easel in the same pose made popular by the art academies.

At first, it seems like she's doing that painting herself into the cannon thing, but a closer look at the canvas reveals that she's using a paint-by-numbers kit Marshall's work makes me wonder whether the artworks that made someone great weren't born of some nugget of genius, but were instead constructed based on the arbitrary rules of an elite few, like a paint-by-numbers kit for turning someone into a capital-G great artist.

Marshall's picture also makes me think about why I've never seen a black woman or a black man like Marshall himself painted in the stereotypical artist pose before? Did they exist? Or were they, like others, written out of history? And what about now? Is there a formula for modern greatness? And does it allow for traditionally excluded artists? Those are some of the questions we hope to answer in future episodes.

Well, just after I finish here, I will be going to the Modern Art Museum in Paris to...

See Kerry James Marshall, The Histories.

This is actually an exhibition I've already seen because it was at the Royal Academy in London towards the end of last year.

But he is an artist originally from Alabama, one of the great painters of our day.

Um, but today, I wish I, you know, I wish that kids understood the importance of, of art back then.

And I wish I knew who Kerry James Marshall was and who Sam Gilliam was and, and, and, you know, and who Barkley Hendricks was back then.

Today, I own some Atlanta artists.

You know, Afrikante is a artist I own, and I own over a hundred works.

And so it was that, that painting that got me looking at other works by him, like The Lovers, which is another piece I, I, I just think is a masterpiece, but also works from the 1950s as well, that, that he keeps on going back to this, this cool, dark, modern color, viridian.

Your writing about The Lovers in the book sent me into Kerry James Marshall's series of-

Right

... paintings of couples and lovers looking to see if he'd picked up on Lawrence's use of viridian.

There was this amazing actress in Technicolor, Marpessa Dawn, who, for me, was a bronze thrill.

So that's why [laughs] I have a, a little homage to, to that film in, in this chapter.

One of the things I thought about when I read the chapter was how pretty much every artist within it rejected Kerry James Marshall's approach to painting Black skin.

Kerry has mostly, not entirely, chosen monochromes within individual works, and across this chapter, we have artists painting many different bronzes within individual works.

Very important to understand.

You know, it reminds me of the great Kerry James Marshall.

This week, I showed my students A clip from Kerry James Marshall.

It was Tuesday.

Tuesday, we were in my Black Aesthetics class, which I renamed Africana Cultural Meaning Making.

We got to get away from the question of aesthetic long enough, this Western branch of philosophy on how you value beauty, and replace that with different language.

In our Africana framework, we would talk about cultural meaning making.

What are the rules for moving through the space culturally among African people, and how do those modalities move? Thinking about that, I showed them a clip from an interview that Brother Marshall did, Kerry James Marshall, with the National...

But that was a fairly recent assessment.

You know, he never, you know, he's never been, he never really kind of during his lifetime operated on the same level of canonical status that, of course, his exact contemporary Kerry James Marshall would operate on, right? And anyway, Pope Bell was, of course, an intensely political person whose work could be very explicitly political and But I think that as a pedagogue, he measured the success of his teaching in terms of how incredibly dissimilar the work of students would be from his.

And Popel's best students, some of whom are gathered in this exhibition, um would never would never you know go anywhere near um you know one of his what what are the letter drawings called again the the skin the skin set drawings are that

you know so

I'm thinking of loads of artists.

Uh, Frank Bowling and Kerry James Marshall-

Mm

... like who again made Black so d- Generative and complex-

Yeah.

Uh, I got another tattoo recently that's, that's based on the stars, uh, in one of Kerry James Marshall's murals, Power and Knowledge, that was hung up in the Chicago Public Library.

And for me, that was a lot more whimsical- [laughs]

Yeah.