Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955 in Birmingham) is a contemporary Chicago-based artist known for his large-scale paintings on African-American themes.
Born in Birmingham, Marshall grew up in South Central Los Angeles and the Watts district, areas at the center of the black power movement of the 1960s and 70s. Interested in painting from an early age, he drew inspiration from his everyday life, as well as from comic books and museum catalogs. Throughout his career his work has been distinguished by the presence of nearly-silhouetted black human figures.
In 1978 Marshall completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He studied with Charles White and Arnold Mesches and expanded his realistic style to mural-sized works, including collages and sculptures. Later works have shown the influence of African aesthetic traditions.
Marshall was awarded a resident fellowship to the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1985. He received fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991 and from the Illinois Arts Council in 1992. In 1997 he was awarded a MacCarthur Foundation "Genius Grant" and another grant from the Herb Alpert Foundation. His work was featured in traveling solo exhibitions in 1994 and 1998. The Birmingham Museum of Art featured work by Marhsall in 2003, and has some of his work in its permanent collection. His work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and Germany's Documenta (1997 and 2007), and is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musuem of Modern Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Museum of Art.
Marshall has also worked as a production designer in independent films and is married to actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce.
References
- Sangster, Gary and Terrie Sultan (1994) Kerry James Marshall: Telling Stories, Selected Paintings. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art
- Westfall, Stephen (October 1994) “Kerry James Marshall.” Art in America Vol. 81, No. 10
- Rowell, Charles H. (1998) "An Interview with Kerry James Marshall." Callaloo Vol. 21, No. 1 pp. 263-72
- Osborne, Catherine (July 1998) "Kerry James Marshall." Parachute
- Crouther, Betty J. (2007) "The Black Artist and His Image in America 65 Years Ago." Southeastern College Art Conference Review Vol. 15, No. 2 pp. 163-