Kerry James Marshall: Black Presence in the Canon

Kerry James Marshall paints ordinary Black life at the scale of history painting and renders skin in deliberately unmixed black pigment, arguing that Black subjects' long absence from museum walls was a choice, not an accident.

He isn't asking to be added to the canon as a courtesy. He's looking at four centuries of European and American painting, the altarpieces, the royal portraits, the grand historical scenes, and asking why so little of it pictured Black people living ordinary lives with any seriousness. Then he paints the missing pictures himself, at the same scale, with the same technical ambition, until the gap is impossible to miss.

Age hasn't slowed any of this down. Marshall is in his seventies now, based in Chicago, and still painting new work. This isn't a story about rediscovery. It's an argument still being made, one canvas at a time.

Who is Kerry James Marshall?

Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1963, settling in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, according to the Saint Louis Art Museum, which holds his 1995 painting Watts 1963. That painting shows Marshall at age eight with his brother and sister, and it's the only strictly autobiographical work in a series he'd paint decades later.

He studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, earning a BFA in 1978. One of his teachers was Charles White, the social realist painter, and White's influence still comes up constantly in how Marshall talks about his own work, according to Otis College's own account of his career. He settled in Chicago in 1987 and has lived and worked there ever since.

Before Chicago fully took hold, there was a year in New York. In 1985 he began a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a stretch the museum itself describes as a real turning point in his development, according to the Studio Museum's own artist page. He also taught painting for over a decade, starting in 1993, at the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Art and Design, a post the university's own event archive still credits him with holding at the time.

Small studio, big questions. That's been the pattern for forty years.

Why does he paint skin in unmixed black?

Because he wants black to function as a real color choice, not an approximation of one.

Marshall mixes ivory black, carbon black, and iron oxide black, then models the figures by adding hues like cobalt blue or chrome oxide green, all without lightening the base tone toward brown or tan. In an interview with Apollo Magazine, he explained the logic directly: "That rhetorical black is the way we describe each other as people. Most people will automatically say, 'Black people aren't black, they're brown'. But then, if you use that rhetorical figure of blackness, why not make it concrete, artistically?"

It's a technical decision that's also a rhetorical one. If black can be treated as a real color, chromatically, the way any other hue gets treated in a painting, then Blackness stops being a deficiency to correct with lighter paint and becomes something a painter can simply build with. Marshall isn't softening the figure so a wider audience feels comfortable. He's doing the opposite, and daring you to keep looking.

How do you paint a legible face without abandoning black?

Carefully, and by treating temperature as the working tool instead of value.

A face rendered in true black on black has almost no light-to-dark range to draw on, which is exactly the problem most painters solve by lightening skin toward brown. Marshall solves it by shifting temperature instead of value. As he's described it to Apollo Magazine, he'll push one passage of black toward cobalt blue and another toward chrome oxide green, so a cheekbone reads as cooler than a jawline even though both are, technically, black paint straight from the tube family he works in. Add a warm, near-white highlight along a brow or a lip and the face snaps into focus without the skin ever leaving black behind.

It's a workaround that became a signature. Once you notice it, you can't unsee it: a face built entirely out of relationships between different blacks, with almost no brown anywhere in the painting.

What was A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self?

This whole approach starts with a single painting from 1980.

Made in egg tempera on paper, it shows the bust of a man rendered almost entirely in black, with only his eyes, his teeth, and the collar of an undershirt breaking the surface. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which holds the painting as a gift of Steven and Deborah Lebowitz, dates it to the year Marshall turned twenty-five. It marked his shift away from collage and toward the figurative painting he's known for now.

Look at the title again. A shadow of his former self isn't a compliment. It's a man reduced to an outline, present but barely legible, which is close to how Black subjects had functioned across most of art history before Marshall started painting them otherwise.

What is the Garden Project series?

Five large canvases, painted in 1994 and 1995, about public housing developments that all happen to have the word "Gardens" in their names.

Marshall has pointed out the irony directly: Rockwell Gardens, Stateway Gardens, and Altgeld Gardens in Chicago, Nickerson Gardens in Watts, all named for something that looked nothing like a garden by the time he painted them. The Denver Art Museum, which holds Better Homes, Better Gardens, notes that the 1994 painting depicts Chicago's Wentworth Gardens development with two figures embracing on a path, bluebirds overhead, sunbeams breaking through. The museum describes Marshall's intent plainly: whatever you think about the projects, they're that and more.

That "more" is the whole point of the series. These paintings don't erase the poverty or the failed planning behind them. They also refuse to let that be the entire story, because gardens were tended there, people fell in love there, kids grew up there. Marshall grew up there too, which is exactly why the series doesn't read like it was painted from a distance.

Why did Past Times sell for $21.1 million?

Because by 2018, the market finally caught up to an argument the painting had been making since 1997.

Past Times shows a Black family's leisurely Sunday, boating, golfing, picnicking, staged with the same compositional ease as an eighteenth-century European pleasure garden painting. The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which runs Chicago's convention center, had bought it in 1997 for $25,000. When it went up for sale at Sotheby's in May 2018, it sold for $21.1 million including fees, a result Culture Type reported made Marshall the most expensive living African American artist at auction, ahead of a record Mark Bradford had set only two months earlier. The buyer, identified afterward, was the music producer Sean Combs.

A twenty-five-thousand-dollar purchase becoming a twenty-one-million-dollar sale isn't really a story about taste catching up to genius overnight. It's a story about how long a market can ignore work before it can't anymore.

What was the Mastry retrospective?

Thirty-five years of work finally got a full survey. Mastry treated Marshall's output as settled art history rather than a conversation still in progress.

Mastry opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in April 2016, covering work the museum describes as running "from his seminal inaugural statement Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) to his most recent explorations of African American history". It traveled to the Met Breuer in New York that October, then closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2017, where MOCA presented nearly 80 paintings co-organized with MCA Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Three of the country's major contemporary art institutions agreeing to co-organize one show says something. It says the argument had been won, at least institutionally. Whether the wider audience had caught up is a separate question, one Marshall's own work keeps asking.

The title itself is doing some of the arguing too. Mastry isn't a typo. It's a deliberate respelling of mastery, and it stakes a claim before a visitor has even walked into the gallery: this painter has full command of the entire history of Western technique, and the show exists to demonstrate that rather than ask permission for it.

What is Rythm Mastr?

Not every Marshall project is a painting on a wall.

Starting in 1999, he built a comic strip called Rythm Mastr, first realized as an installation for the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, according to Art21's account of the project. The heroes come out of the Yoruba tradition of the seven African powers, reimagined as contemporary superheroes with real supernatural ability, set in a version of the neighborhood around his own Chicago studio. Marshall has explained the project came from a simple observation: Black kids love comics and superheroes exactly as much as anyone else does, and the industry had rarely given them heroes built to last more than a season.

He kept returning to it. Culture Type reported that Marshall brought Rythm Mastr back nearly two decades later for the 2018 edition of the same Carnegie International, in new paintings, light boxes, and prints. A painter this serious about history doesn't usually also run a superhero universe on the side. Marshall does both, and neither one plays second fiddle to the other.

What is Marshall actually arguing about art history?

That Black absence from the canon was never neutral. Someone chose it, painting after painting, century after century, and Marshall is painting the correction.

He isn't trying to slot Black figures into existing compositions as an act of representation for its own sake. He's using the actual tools of history painting, the scale and the compositional confidence of the artists who built the Western tradition, and pointing them at subjects that tradition mostly ignored. A family reunion. A barbershop. A woman getting her hair done. None of it needed inventing. It just needed someone willing to paint it as seriously as anyone ever painted a saint or a king.

That's the through line from A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self to Past Times to Mastry. Not discovery. Correction.

Where this leaves collectors

Marshall's own paintings sell in the tens of millions now, well outside what almost anyone reading this will ever bid on at Sotheby's. What his career actually offers a collector is a way of looking: at scale, at seriousness, at the choice to paint Black figures as the entire subject of a picture rather than a supporting detail.

Noirci Studio works from that same premise on a very different scale. Every canvas in the portrait collection, Black woman canvas art included, is an original oil or watercolor by a working painter, reproduced on archival giclee canvas and printed to order in the United States. It's not a stand-in for a museum wall. It's a way to bring that same argument, that Black figures deserve the full weight of serious painting, into a room where you actually live.

If Marshall's history-painting scale speaks to you, the Black excellence wall art collection works from a related instinct: pieces that treat achievement and presence as the subject, not the footnote. And if it's his use of tone and pigment that stayed with you, there's melanin artwork that takes skin itself as the subject in a more direct way than most prints attempt.

Sources

• Saint Louis Art Museum: Watts 1963. Confirms Marshall's childhood in the Nickerson Gardens housing project and its place in the Garden Project series.
• Otis College of Art and Design: Kerry James Marshall. Confirms his BFA training and Charles White's influence.
• Studio Museum in Harlem: Kerry James Marshall. Confirms his 1985-86 residency and career overview.
• University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts: Voices, Kerry James Marshall. Confirms his teaching post starting in 1993.
• Apollo Magazine: an interview with Kerry James Marshall. Marshall's own explanation of his use of unmixed black pigment.
• Art21: Kerry James Marshall, Rythm Mastr. Background on the comic project.
• Culture Type: Kerry James Marshall is revisiting his Rythm Mastr comic series at the 2018 Carnegie International. Confirms the project's return in 2018.
• LACMA: A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980. Collection record for the painting.
• Denver Art Museum: Better Homes, Better Gardens. Collection record for a painting in the Garden Project series.
• Culture Type: Kerry James Marshall's Past Times soars to record-setting $21.1 million at Sotheby's. Reports the 2018 auction result.
• MCA Chicago: Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. Exhibition record for the 2016 opening.
• MOCA: Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. Exhibition record for the 2017 Los Angeles leg.