Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall has reshaped the canon of Western art by centring the Black figure in compositions that are as visually commanding as they are politically and historically resonant. Working across painting, drawing, collage and installation, Marshall brings a masterful technique and encyclopaedic art historical knowledge to bear on contemporary questions of race, representation and cultural memory.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955 and later raised in South Central Los Angeles, Marshall’s early life was shaped by the civil rights movement and Black Power politics. He studied at the Otis Art Institute, where he immersed himself in European painting traditions while exploring African-American cultural narratives that were largely absent from museum collections. His decision to exclusively depict Black subjects emerged as both a personal and political act — one aimed at redressing centuries of omission and misrepresentation.

Marshall’s breakthrough work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), set the tone for a career defined by formal innovation and critical intervention. Rendered in shades of near-total black, the painting established the silhouette as a recurring visual and conceptual motif. Throughout his practice, Marshall has explored Blackness not only as a subject but as a chromatic and symbolic strategy.

In monumental paintings such as De Style (1993), Past Times (1997) and School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), he combines Renaissance perspective, Mannerist composition and the aesthetics of vernacular culture — comic books, murals, housing projects — to create richly layered images. These works do not merely insert Black subjects into classical idioms; they interrogate the structures that excluded them in the first place.

Marshall has described his mission as ‘a counter-history of painting’ — an effort to claim space for Black life within the highest forms of cultural production. His work often addresses the social fabric of African-American communities, from intimate domestic scenes to civic institutions such as barbershops, libraries and schools.

Over the past three decades, Marshall has gained widespread institutional recognition. His mid-career retrospective Mastry, which travelled from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to The Met Breuer and MOCA Los Angeles (2016–17), was hailed as a landmark in American art history. In 2018, Past Times became the most expensive work by a living African-American artist when it sold for $21.1 million at auction.

A meticulous draftsman and eloquent thinker, Marshall continues to challenge the frameworks through which art is made, shown and understood. Based in Chicago, he remains one of the most influential artists working today.