ART-PRESENTATION: Kerry James Marshall-Collected Works
Born in Alabama, Kerry James Marshall uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, and photography to comment on the history of black identity both in the United States and in Western art. He is well known for paintings that focus on black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, and has explored issues of race and history through imagery ranging from abstraction to comics.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Rennie Museum Archive
Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition “Collected Works” at Rennie Museum features works spanning 32 year of his complex body of work. The exhibition reveals Kerry James Marshall’s practice to be a complex and compelling one that synthesizes a wide range of pictorial traditions to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society and reassert the place of the black figure within the canon of Western painting. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in Birmingham, Alabama, Marshall moved with his family to the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1963, two years before the 1965 rebellion in protest of police brutality. He studied at Otis College of Art and Design. At the time, abstraction and conceptualism seemed to offer universal languages that were free from the constraints of gender, race, or economic privilege. But this was certainly not the case. Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. He is known for his large-scale narrative history paintings featuring black figures, defiant assertions of blackness in a medium in which African Americans have long been invisible, and his exploration of art history covers a broad temporal swath stretching from the Renaissance to 20th Century American Abstraction. The artist critically examines and reworks the Western canon through its most archetypal forms: the historical tableau, landscape and genre painting, and portraiture. His work also touches upon vernacular forms such as the muralist tradition and the comic book in order to address and correct, in his words, the “vacuum in the image bank” and to make the invisible visible. The sculptural installation “Untitled (Black Power Stamps)” (1998), Marshall’s very first work acquired by Bob Rennie, aptly sets the tone of the exhibition. Five colossal stamps and their corresponding ink pads are dispersed over the floor of the space. Inscribed on each stamp, and reiterated on the walls, are phrases of power dating back to the Civil Rights Movement: “Black is Beautiful”, “Black Power”, “We Shall Overcome”, “By Any Means Necessary”, and “Burn Baby Burn”. The sentiment reverberates through three 5.5 meter wide paintings installed in the same room, titled “Untitled (Red)” (2011), “Untitled (Black)” and “Untitled (Green)” ( both 2012). Exhibited together for the first time in North America, the imposing paintings with their colors saluting the Pan African flag The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) formally adopted the Flag on 3/8/1920 in Article 39 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, during its month-long convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. “Wake” (2003‐05), is a sculptural work that focuses on the collective trauma of slavery. Draped atop a blackened model sailboat is a web of medallions featuring portraits of descendants of the approximately twenty African slaves who first landed in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Atop a polished black base evoking the deep seas, the medallions cascade over and behind the mourning vessel in a gilded procession, cast out in the boat’s wake. At first, Kerry considered a career in children’s book illustration. Ralph Ellison’s novel “The Invisible Man”, about a black man whose skin color renders him marginalized, inspired Kerry to make his painting “Invisible Man” (1986) , a historic work and one of the first to feature Marshall’s now iconic black on black tonal paintings. Marshall’s work literalizes the premise of black invisibility. Only distinguishable by his bright‐white eyes and teeth and the subtle warmth that delineates black body from black background, Marshall’s figure, like Ellison’s protagonist, subverts his own invisibility, using colour as an emblem of power rather than of submission.
Info: Rennie Museum, 51 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Duration: 2/6-3/11/18, Wed 16:00-20:00, Sat-sun 12:00-18:00, www.renniecollection.org
