Moca museum black frames4/9/2023 ![]() There is only love amongst these subjects, and specifically Black love. There is no distinction between the subjects’ shades: each person is painted a deepest black, deriding any possibility of shadism or self-hatred, removing any space for division or disconnectedness. The Black figure here is extraordinary, all-encompassing, demanding of our gaze. Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012, acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas, 107 7/8 x 157 7/8 in., collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth (Bibby) Smith, the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, Jane Comer, the Sankofa Society, and general acquisition funds, photo by Sean Pathasema This problem was the one of absence of black subjectivity.” ![]() “But it seemed to me to not be worth my while to adopt any of those strategies as my primary mode of address when the problem that I thought was most paramount had not been solved. In a conversation between the two, at MOCA in March 2017, Marshall explained that his entry into the world of painting diverged from many of his peers of the Pictures Generation: “Conceptual Art, Performance, Video, I understood and I had access to all of that too,” he says. It charts his journey from what he describes as the flat, schematic, highly stylized Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self to what Helen Molesworth, MOCA’s chief curator, describes as paintings with more subjectivity, more of an “individualized” capaciousness. What Marshall is communicating is vast and will keep you thinking long after leaving the museum. The dynamism and life of the paintings dance from the walls despite the stillness of the subjects. This first US retrospective shows the breadth of Marshall’s work. Somehow the figures in these paintings are all there, but retracted from the surface. A similar quality can be found in The Small Pin-Up, where there’s an iridescence to the black, with an illusion of stillness and a ghost-like nature. ![]() Beginning with A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, the black is less dense in contrast to his 2003 Black Painting, a mournful depiction of the minutes before the violent police attack on Fred Hampton and other members of the Black Panther Party in 1969. Each black has a different value and as one travels through the museum, it is evident how his understanding of the blacks has changed over the course of his career. ![]() Marshall uses three types of black in his paintings, derived from various natural sources: iron-oxide-based, carbon-based, and ivory black, originally derived from burned bone. He therefore thoughtfully manipulates the pigment to create a multi-textured experience, a practice on clear display in his exhibition The Mastry at MOCA. ![]() Marshall explains that he doesn’t want his subjects to collapse into one another, but for each one to maintain some form of individuality. Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 8 x 6.5 in., Steven and Deborah Lebowitz, photo by Matthew Fried, © MCA Chicago ![]()
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