{"data":{"id":"4817","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":4817,"topgoose_id":1337,"tms_id":4817,"display_name":"Kerry James Marshall","sort_name":"Marshall Kerry James","display_date":"1955–","begin_date":"1955","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eKerry James Marshall gained prominence in the 1990s for works that invoke the grand traditions of history painting and yet pointedly defy the genre. Throughout his already four-decade-long career, Marshall has often depicted African American subjects—long omitted from traditional narratives of art history—in everyday settings that exude an otherworldly aura. During the rise of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s, when photography and conceptually based art were primarily addressing these issues, Marshall employed the more traditional form of figurative painting to investigate notions of identity.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMarshall studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and the influence of his drawing instructor \u003ca href=\"/artists/1412\"\u003eCharles White\u003c/a\u003e, an artist known for his social realist murals, can be seen in Marshall’s conjunction of expert draftsmanship with unconventional materials and Old Master techniques such as grisaille. In 1998 he created a suite of four monumental paintings for \u003cem\u003eMementos\u003c/em\u003e, his multimedia installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. The four \u003cem\u003eSouvenir\u003c/em\u003e paintings commemorate African American icons who made invaluable contributions to American culture and died in the 1960s. Set in a middle-class domestic interior, \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/11971\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSouvenir IV\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e memorializes musical pioneers, including John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, whose faces appear as celestial presences above the black-and-white living room. A lone woman sits on the sofa below, bearing a set of brilliant angel’s wings as she gazes directly at the viewer—an invitation to join in the remembrance of those “key African Americans and their creative legacies.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, \u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 254.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500116210","wikidata_id":"Q832432","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:20:19.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-11T07:02:07.591-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/4817/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/4817/exhibitions"}}}}