An Interview With Kerry James Marshall
- An Interview with Kerry James Marshall
This interview was conducted by telephone on February 9, 1998, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chicago, Illinois.
What occasioned your series called “Lost Boys”? What were you trying to achieve in it?
Well, what brought it about, or where the idea originated, I guess, had something to do with a slightly autobiographical situation. Not myself directly, but my youngest brother who ended up in prison—he spent seven years in prison—and went into jail just shortly before I started the Lost Boys series. A part of the reason I started that group of paintings was a reaction to how I felt about him being incarcerated. I mean it’s one thing when you know other people or hear about people who are taken to jail or to prison and especially through certain violent kinds of incidents. But it’s another thing when it’s now at home and it’s your own brother. I mean the impact of that experience was really kind of extreme for me. And so I just . . . I thought about it a lot. And thinking about that plus the weight of the numbers of black men who end up going through a lot of traumatic experiences kind of sat heavy on my mind. I have always been interested in children’s literature, because there was a point at which I had wanted to be a children’s book illustrator. And one of the books that struck me was Peter Pan by J.M. Berry and the whole situation of the lost boys . . . you know, a group of young boys who were lost down in Never, Never Land, where they never really had to grow up, a kind of willful underdevelopment on their part. But if I apply that concept of being lost in a Never, Never Land to a lot of young black men, where in some cases it wasn’t that they had a willful desire never to grow up, as much as they often never had an opportunity to grow up because there were far too many young black men cut down very early in their lives, you know. And many of them probably with promising futures. Futures that are kind of wasted. And so it was thinking about that book and that concept of being lost from Peter Pan and then applying it to a concept of being lost: lost in America, lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in illiteracy. And all of those things sort of changed . . . all of those things kind of came together with the fact that my own brother now seemed to be one of those lost. And that’s why I started that group of paintings.
What is the relationship of the technique or style in these paintings to the rest of your work? What about its imagery also? What, if any, is the relationship of your painting to tradition in American painting in general? [End Page 263]
If I think about them in terms of the traditions they address in painting, I wouldn’t say that it was limited so much to a tradition in American painting as much as a tradition of painting icons and/or a kind of elegiac portraiture. Look all the way back to Egyptian funerary portraits. So I would link them more specifically to that kind of a tradition and then from there into more medieval and early renaissance traditions of portraiture than I would to any particular kind of American style of painting. If anything could be said to be an American component to the painting, there’s a certain element of gestural abstraction in those portraits, especially in the background. And also a certain quality of graffiti in the application of that kind of gestural kind of abstract painting in the back. If we had to link that to something that might be peculiarly American, that might be the closest. The Lost Boys was a way of combining various styles of painting into one painting so that you can have a representational image, very stylized, like the figures are, and...
