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The Power of Kerry James Marshall

Estimated reading time ~ 4 min
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Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. Photo courtesy of Roͬͬ͠͠͡͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠sͬͬ͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠aͬͬ͠͠͠͠͠͠͠ Menkman

Last month, the Jopwell team took a trip to the Met to see “Mastry,” the most expansive exhibition of Kerry James Marshall’s work to date. Seeing the retrospective of one of the world’s most prominent Black artist was a poignant experience.

Kerry’s work deals with the Black experience at large, but he’s always been particularly concerned with the conversation between Black artistry and the White establishment. He makes beautiful, technically masterful pieces, but he has also been obsessed with questions of whether there would be a place for him – for people who look like us – and if so where.

Taken broadly, Kerry’s life is a pointed reflection of those within Jopwell’s community: How do individuals carve out their own spaces? How do they hold onto the things that make them unique while conversing with, contributing to, and participating fully in the culture at large?

Born in Alabama before moving to Los Angeles as a child, Kerry often talks about “how an outsider gets in.” One of his most famous paintings, Untitled (Studio), really stands out in this regard. A giant canvas, it is a still-life of a master artist at work, positioning models in a busy studio festooned with paints and tools. As the Met’s catalogue describes it, the painting retells one of Kerry’s earliest experiences while on scholarship at the Otis Art Institute in LA: “His instructor brought the class upstairs to see the workspace of one of Marshall's childhood idols, Charles White (1918–1979). Enthralled by all of the studio materials and partially finished work, the young artist realized that making pictures is something he, too, could do.”

What is he telling us here? That people of every color need examples. As we choose which dreams to pin our hopes on, we need to see others who share our experiences and thrive in the places we want to go.

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After art school, Kerry embarked on a career in which he has covered everything from the everyday to the most important historical moments in American Black life: His "Gardens" Series memorialized the housing projects of Black Chicago; he painted a series of surreal pieces celebrating the “martyrs” of the Civil Rights Movement; he’s taken photographic essays of the rural South. Through all of these, the connecting thread is the use of visual cues to place familiar scenes within, and in conversation with, the art-historical movements that fill the collections of museums like The Met: Kerry took the Classical painters’ treatments of Venus and used them to examine Black female beauty. His series depicting Chicago’s housing projects ties the residents’ lives to the works of the Romantic masters, elevating the Black figures at their center.

This is an artist who has been determined from the start to express the truths of his own experience while matching, and advancing, the best work of the majority culture at large. It’s inspiring to see someone who looks like me – like us – who’s had resounding success in such a rarefied space.

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Of all Kerry’s works, the “Painters” – a series of self-portraits of imagined Black painters - might tell us more than any other. The pieces are all arrestingly beautiful, full of color and depth. But what they symbolically depict is even more interesting: Each painting, including its subject, is drawn using traditional figurative techniques, yet each also holds a palette or canvas on which the paints with which the artists depict themselves blend together in abstract.

The palettes and canvases are abstracted in homage to Abstract Expressionism and the promise it held for minority artists - and this is a key choice. Minority artists saw Abstraction, historically, as a chance for freedom. It offered a medium in which their work might be received without any prevarications tied to their ethnic identities (or those of their subjects). And so the “Painters” portraits are filled with symbolic promise for those who we work with, and work to serve, at Jopwell. They represent the work each of us does to make our selves.

The work of creating oneself is as central to each of us as it is to the artist. At Jopwell, by helping members of our community access more information, meet more people and see all sorts of new opportunities, we allow them more agency than ever before as they plot their own paths and choose the selves that they will create. Kerry’s portraits of Black artists, their need to consciously and confidently create themselves, connects perfectly with the experience of all minority professionals - this making is essential.

"Mastry" would appear to be either the best tool to make oneself or the final state of having done so.

“Mastry”, Kerry James Marshall’s Retrospective, is about to reopen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. So, if you’re in LA, go check it out. It’s amazing. That aside, something to leave you with as you continue to make yourself:

"I understand something about the power of images: The things you see actually matter. And the more things you see that are different from each other, the more they matter.

When you come to the museum, if you only saw images that were out of the European tradition and you never saw images that came from another perspective, or that pictured other people (and not just incidentally or every now and then, but in a substantial and critical mass) then there’s always going to be something missing. And that’s something that’d be missing that really cripples our ability to imagine the world in the fullness of its possibility.”

  • Kerry James Marshall
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