"Black Romantic"
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall discusses what it means to create Black Art during the installation of his 2008 exhibition Black Romantic at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.
The subject matter of Marshall’s work is entrenched in the geography of his upbringing. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility,” says the artist. “You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go.”
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Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. The artist was educated at Otis Art Institute, where he received a BFA in 1978 and an honorary doctorate in 1999. In his work, Marshall interrogates Western art history, recontextualizing the canon to include themes and imagery that have been historically excluded. Through his paintings, drawings, installations, and public works, the artist builds a body of work that privileges the Black figure, using race, history, and everyday Black experiences as the inspiration for his work.
