Kerry James Marshall 'Vignettes' Folio Available

Artist: Kerry James Marshall
Title: Vignettes
Medium: Giclee Prints
Size: (A3) 29.7 x 42 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Prices: £195

 

Kerry James Marshall is an American painter born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, whose real name is Kerry James Marshall. He is celebrated for placing Black subjects at the center of Western art history, using deep, obsidian pigments to assert presence and challenge centuries of erasure. After moving to Los Angeles in 1963 and studying at Otis College of Art and Design, he developed a precise, layered technique that fuses Renaissance glazing with contemporary narrative, often working in egg tempera for unmatched chromatic depth.

His landmark pieces include A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), a near-black figure emerging from an equally black ground, and the monumental Many Mansions (1994), where three impeccably dressed men tend a flowerbed in front of crumbling public housing, ironically titled after a biblical promise of abundance. These works confront stereotypes while infusing scenes of everyday Black life with dignity, hope and biting satire.

Marshall’s practice extends to history painting, collage and public murals, all aimed at “wrestling with the sinewy, sneaky forces of colonization, privilege and erasure”. His 2012 canvas School of Beauty, School of Culture reimagines Velázquez’s Las Meninas inside a bustling African American hair salon, complete with a distorted Disney princess that critiques Western beauty standards.

Recipient of a 1997 MacArthur Fellowship and the 2014 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Marshall continues to live and work in Chicago, producing works that insist on the visibility, complexity and beauty of Black experience within the grand narrative of art.