Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. His paintings, most of them large-scale works featuring African-American subjects, are composed in a style that blends social realism with outsider art and demonstrate a critical, self-conscious and sensuous eye. His insistence on the visibility of black lives in traditional forms (historical tableaux, portraits, landscapes) has earned him the recognition over the last 35 years as one of America’s greatest living artists. And now a major museum survey of his work, “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” has been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The show ran at the Met Breuer in New York through January 29, and is now at MOCA in Los Angeles through July 2. Below (and above), PROVOKR presents a dazzling portfolio of 24 works from the exhibit.
Kerry James Marshall, painter, printmaker, photographer and installation artist, at the Walker Art Center, 2005. Photo: Cameron Wittig, courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
