Giant of African-American art, Kerry James Marshall, will speak for free at UBC Robson Square
Kerry James Marshall has won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He's been called the "modern master" who's "spent his life bringing black faces to classic art" by Chicago magazine.
And in October 2016, the New York Times published a headline that simply said: "Kerry James Marshall's Paintings Show What It Means to Be Black in America".
"Black skin is a constant in Mr. Marshall’s art. More than three decades ago, he resolved to devote himself to creating a new, disruptive art history, one that would insert — big-time — the absent black figure into the tradition of Western art, which was a tradition he loved and identified with," wrote Holland Cotter.
This week, the Guardian ran a lengthy piece linked to the recent $21.1-million sale of his 1997 painting, Past Times, which set a record for a black artist. It was reportedly purchased by rapper and businessman Sean Combs.
And next week, this giant of African-American art will be in Vancouver to deliver a free lecture at the UBC Robson Square Theatre.
It's part of the Rennie Speakers Series and it takes place on Thursday (May 31) at 6:30 p.m. This coincides with the Rennie Museum showing a survey of Marshall's work over a 32-year period, running from June 2 to November 3.
Rennie is one of the largest collectors of African American art outside of the United States. And he's devoted tremendous attention on collecting works by Marshall, who was born in Birmingham in 1955 and was raised in South Central Los Angeles.
"Kerry James Marshall deals a lot with where African-American painters have been left out of the trajectory of painting history and also with the fight for identity in the white society," Rennie told the Straight in 2015.
At the time, Rennie was especially impressed by a conceptual work called Heirlooms and Accessories. Rennie bought it at an auction and it was included in a 2015–16 exhibition called Collected Works at the Rennie Museum.
Heirlooms and Accessories was inspired by a double lynching of black men that took place in Marion, Indiana in 1930. This gruesome event was later turned into a postcard.
In the video below, Marshall explains how he was struck by the "casualness" of the white audience that witnessed the lynchings, and how little regard they demonstrated for the rule of law.
The artist reveals that he decided to focus on three white women who were all looking at the camera when the photograph was taken.
Then he turned their images into heirlooms in the form of lockets presented as a triptych.
"Everybody who was there was an accessory to a double murder," Marshall notes in the video. "Heirlooms are things that are passed down from one generation to the next."
He points out that jewellery is an accessory, as well as an heirloom.
"The power to inflict that kind of violence is also an heirloom that is sort of passed down. So what I did with the photograph is to reduce the lynching to almost invisibility. It barely hovers there in the background."
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