Kerry James Marshall
1955–
Kerry 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.
Marshall studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and the influence of his drawing instructor Charles White, 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 Mementos, his multimedia installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. The four Souvenir paintings commemorate African American icons who made invaluable contributions to American culture and died in the 1960s. Set in a middle-class domestic interior, Souvenir IV 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.”
Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 254.
Introduction
Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois.
A retrospective exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2016.
Wikidata identifier
Q832432
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 20, 2025.
Introduction
Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, Kerry James Marshall painted representations of Black individuals in his large-scale narrative works. Marshall received a BFA from Otis Art Institute in 1978, and he has served as an associate professor of art at the University of Illinois, Chicago since 1993.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, collagist, painter
ULAN identifier
500116210
Names
Kerry James Marshall, Kerry Marshall
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 20, 2025.
