Kerry James Marshall

Souvenir IV
1998

Monochrome artwork of a room with a figure surrounded by floating portraits and names of musicians, with the phrase "We Mourn Our Loss."

On view
Floor 5

Date
1998

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Acrylic, glitter, and screenprint on paper on tarpaulin, with metal grommets

Dimensions
Overall: 107 5/8 × 157 1/2in. (273.4 × 400.1 cm)

Accession number
98.56

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee

Rights and reproductions
© Kerry James Marshall; courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

API
artworks/11971

The 13-foot-wide Souvenir IV, painted in grisaille on unstretched canvas and shown pinned to the wall like a ceremonial banner, is one of a series of four works dedicated to cultural figures and Civil Rights leaders who died in the 1960s, most but not all of them African-American. At its center is a scroll listing important musicians; cloud-haloed heads above trumpet other artists, and additional figures are named in the banderoles at the upper margin. On a sofa in a well-appointed living room (based on those of Kerry James Marshall’s relatives and friends) sits a dignified older black woman, her bearing so calm that it is easy to overlook the massive pair of wings on her shoulders. If much of the text in Souvenir IV is elegiac—especially the message “We Mourn Our Loss” at bottom—the image of this woman adds a note of poignant celebration. Marshall’s work sidesteps conventional or condemnatory summaries of African-American experience. Instead, he explores the rarely acknowledged optimism that flourishes amid difficult circumstances and the pride that outlives mourning for fallen heroes.

Audio

Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998

In Human Interest

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Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998

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Narrator: This large banner-like painting by Kerry James Marshall is part of a series called Souvenir, intended to commemorate important African American cultural figures of the 1960s.
Kerry James Marshall: Now, one of the things you’ll see in the paintings, is there’s a list, or roll call, of individuals. And in the painting here, Souvenir IV, at the Whitney Museum, the roll call is a list of musicians, and in this case, they’re all blues, jazz and R&B musicians.
Narrator: Across the top of the painting, in the cloud-like forms, are the faces of other musicians.
Kerry James Marshall: And in that pantheon of images there, you see people like Dinah Washington, you see Billie Holiday, you see John Coltrane, you see Wes Montgomery, Little Walter, and each one of those musicians in the pantheon across the top also speaks the name of another musician, so it’s a way to try to get as large a roll call as I could.
Narrator: Marshall included musicians who died between 1959 and 1970, the years bracketing the sixties.
Kerry James Marshall: 1959 was when Billie Holiday died and 1970 is when Jimi Hendrix died. And you can see in the bottom curl of the scroll floating in the middle of the living room, that J-I-M underneath that curl begins the name of Jimi Hendrix.
One of the things I wanted to do with the naming of all of these other people, who also died during the same period that the Kennedys and Martin Luther King died, was to expand the pantheon of people who were worthy of remembrance to include people who didn’t receive the same kind of popular commemoration that the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King did.
Narrator: Marshall sets this painting in a contemporary middle class interior, except that his protagonist, an elderly woman, has a pair of wings, like an angel.
Kerry James Marshall: And I think in a way, one of the things I was trying to suggest in the painting is that this is the world we live in. It’s ordinary and magical at the same time. And the thing is, at any moment we can recreate or call up visions of these people and relive a sense of the time through the power of what they produced.
Narrator: You’ve been listening to an excerpt of Dinah Washington singing This Bitter Earth.