The MCA is honored to present the first major museum survey of Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), one of America’s greatest living painters. The exhibition focuses primarily on Marshall’s paintings made over the last thirty-five years, from his seminal inaugural statement Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) to his most recent explorations of African American history. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for his large-scale paintings featuring black figures, defiant assertions of blackness in a medium in which African Americans have long been “invisible men,” Marshall’s interrogation of art history covers a broad temporal swath stretching from the Renaissance to twentiethcentury American abstraction. He critically interrogates the Western canon through its most canonical forms: the historical tableau, landscape, and portraiture. His work also touches upon vernacular forms such as the comic book and the muralist tradition, in order to address and correct the “lack in the image bank” — in other words, to make the invisible visible.Marshall studied in Los Angeles with acclaimed social realist painter Charles White and participated in the residency program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has received solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America and his work has been included in such prestigious international exhibitions as the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the 2003 Venice Biennial, the 2009 Gwangju Biennal, two Documentas (1997 and 2007), and the 1999 Carnegie International. His paintings are in private collections and foundations as well as major public collections including the MCA’s. This exhibition is co-organized with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and cocurated by Manilow Senior Curator Dieter Roelstraete; Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Ian Alteveer, Associate Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Abigail Winograd, Research Associate at the MCA. A comprehensive monograph accompanies the exhibition, featuring essays by the curators as well as a contribution by poet and literary historian Elizabeth Alexander.
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