The Essential New Art Examiner

Kerry James Marshall

D an S . W ang Kerry James Marshall Agent of Change February 2001 What did Sam Cooke’s mother’s house look like? If Mercy Dee had a sister, how did she decorate her living room? If you have a likely idea, then chances are good that you are black. Whites, especially of a certain age and class, are more often than not familiar with the songs, but not the people. If you are white, Aretha Franklin’s recorded voice may hold a prominent place in the soundtrack of your life, but how often do you hang with your black neighbors, over at their house? Kerry James Marshall paints images of those people. His “Mementos” show, first exhibited at the Renaissance Society in 1998 and traveling throughout the United States since then, takes the 1960s as its subject; collective historical memory is its obvious theme. But a different consideration of this Chicago-based artist’s “Souvenir” paintings included in the show reveals a consequence of that decade and the gap between a culture and its products still felt very vividly today. Each of these domestic tableaux is based on the actual interior of one of the artist’s relatives or relative’s friend’s houses. In representing these specific environments, Marshall renders visible the problem of being intimate with a cultural product but not its producers, of knowing a culture through its expressions but not its members. In the wall-sized painting Souvenir IV, Marshall depicts an interior based on his mother-in-law’s friend’s living room, over which emerges a heavenly array of deceased musicians all identified in their day as “Negro” or “colored.” Marshall screenprinted the names and faces of D A N S . W A N G    Kerry James Marshall   309 these figures in a zone outside the perspectival space of the room, thus rendering visible the non-corporeal realm of memory. And yet this roster of black cultural greats belongs in this room—together they establish the territory of the painting’s surface. By situating a black cultural memory—now in the process of mainstream canonization—within the sweep of a black living space alien to most non-black people, Marshall exposes that white people’s media consumption is not a valid substitute for social interaction. This is a significant point when one realizes that Marshall—whose work has in recent years been shown in such prestigious exhibitions as the Carnegie International, the Whitney Biennial, and documenta X— chooses to reside and make art in the Third Ward on Chicago’s South Side, in what many would say is the heart of the near south ghetto. The specificity of indigence and segregation to this location is an essential consideration in drawing a thread of continuity between this place where he lives and Marshall’s artistic and pedagogical practice. (Marshall is a tenured faculty member at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.) Marshall’s commitment to a skill-based foundation accounts for his varied early works on paper, canvas, and board, using collage, charcoal, tempera, woodcut, and acrylics. As a whole, these works stand as a record of Marshall’s earnest pursuit of mastering the manipulation of materials. At the same time as he honed his painterly skills, Marshall also laid the groundwork for what has become a sort of personal hallmark: the image of the jet-black figure. A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self from 1980, in which Marshall paints a figure almost too dark to be seen but flashing a gap toothed Cheshire cat grin, predicts by a decade the powerful use of non-valorized black figures by artists such as Thom Shaw and Kara Walker. And by enunciating his racial identity as a given, Marshall clears a path toward conceptual and art-historical concerns early on, rather than dwelling on narrowly autobiographical narratives. Marshall’s rejection of the strictly autobiographical means that he has chosen to dispense with the artist as storyteller in favor of the artist as critic, theorist, and historian. The resultant seriousness of inquiry has allowed him to work in representational styles not historically associated with the narratives of any marginalized population. In fact, much of his output aims for a stylistic position updating that most hallowed of visual traditions, the painting of the pre- and early Modern European masters. It may be that only an artist with Marshall’s seemingly [3.15.221.67] Project...