Kerry James Marshall

I spend too much time on the LinkedIn. I'm at the point where I'm on it enough to…discover art?

Tiffany J Cody, a corporate communications executive based in New Jersey, used LinkedIn a few weeks ago to share her thoughts on one of her favorite artists.

Awesome.

The artist, Kerry James Marshall. Cody was particularly moved by the way he uses the color black in his paintings.

This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Marshall was born the same year as my dad, in the middle of the fifties. In Birmingham, Alabama.

His dad had a hobby of buying broken watches from pawnshops on the cheap, figuring out how to fix them with his own research, before then reselling them. Watching his dad, Marshall learned how to take complex things apart, break them down and make them his own.

In the sixties, his family moved to the Watts district. I'm from New York. I didn't have much context for the neighborhood before studying Killer of Sheep in film school. A few years after settling in Nickerson Gardens, Marshall would live through the neighborhood's race riots.

Kerry James Marshall knew political power in Western art manifested itself through painting. So he spent hundreds of hours in figure-drawing classes, studying anatomy, learning from Veronese and Rembrandt. Too few Black painters had made it into the canon, so he set out to change that from the moment he picked up a brush.

He paints figures with an extremely dark, black complexion.

He says,

“Black people occupy a space, even mundane spaces, in the most fascinating ways. Style is such an integral part of what black people do that just walking is not a simple thing. You’ve got to walk with style. You’ve got to talk with a certain rhythm; you’ve got to do things with some flair. And so in the paintings I try to enact that same tendency toward the theatrical that seems to be so integral a part of the black cultural body.”

In May, one of his 1992 paintings sold for $2.1 million at Christie's. His new work pushes into seven figures. But Marshall still lives like he doesn't quite trust it. After an interview with the New York Times, he drove the reporter back to his hotel in an old beige minivan, apparently on its last legs.

I'm not a painter. I studied film. But the same forces are at work in other mediums. Aesthetics aren't just about taste. They shape access, power, and money. What gets seen gets valued. Before you can change the economics, you have to change what people believe belongs.

That's the burden of aesthetics. You have to make people care.

“I see life and the world simply as an arena for competition. That's just what people do, and there are always going to be winners and losers.”

The only way for black artists and black subjects to become common enough in museums that they no longer feel like political statements, he said, is for powerful, wealthy people, primarily black people, to begin tilting the playing field toward “some kind of parity.”

Marshall understands the power of images. Most ads, most billboards, most museum walls: white faces, white bodies. Beauty, prestige, importance, all coded in whiteness. He set out to change that. He painted Black figures, bold and undeniable, to offset the idea that beauty had only one face.

I feel the weight of that. We have all struggled to love ourselves and find worth in a world that doesn't always reflect it back.

Kerry James Marshall creates comics too. When they asked him about Black Panther, he didn't celebrate it as a win. He pointed out that the character was still created by Stan Lee. To him, it's more about who's telling the story. In too many instances, Black versions of white characters is often just blackface for intellectual property.

Marshall critiques the black elite as well. Love this guy.

“People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.”

I'm inspired by his candor, and his frank acknowledgement that the challenges of the game don't mean we can't compete.

“The reality is that you have to fight under the existing rules, the ones that were there when you arrived on the scene. If it's a basketball game, you can't show up with a football just because you don't like the shape of the basketball.”

If I had all the money in the world, Marshall would paint the film posters to movies I produce.

Anyways…well, I guess…thanks LinkedIn.