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Introduction
Most artists get their inspiration for their artwork from the things that they know or from the things that they have had some kind of experience with. For African-American artist Kerry James Marshall, this means including his own background and experience into his artwork so that these elements of his life provide a meaningful backdrop to the images he paints. Marshall’s paintings are relatively easy to understand in spite of the great deal of activity occurring on the frequently large paintings, perhaps because they are drawn from a broad area of relatively recent cultural experience.
Most of Marshall’s work is based upon the 1950s Civil Rights Movement, the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the 1960s and a number of other uniquely Black experiences in the reluctant American cultural landscape. In his paintings, Marshall conveys a sense of his own experience growing up as a black boy in a racist society, his own understanding of how the black people are kept down by the practices and policies of white business and the hope and perseverance of the black race as they struggle to attain equal status and respect in spite of the white efforts to ‘keep them in their place.’
Main body
Born into the heart of the Civil Rights movement, Kerry James Marshall was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Although black people were again riding buses by the time Marshall was a year old, Alabama was still a hotbed of violent activity. “Snipers shot at buses, forcing the city to suspend bus operations after 5 P.M. A group tried to start a whites-only bus service. There was also a wave of bombings. The homes of two black leaders, four Baptist churches, the People’s Service Station and Cab Stand, and the home of another black were all bombed. In addition, an unexploded bomb was found on King’s front porch” (Cozzens, 2006).
It was this violence that caused his family to decide to move to L.A. when Marshall was 8 year old. However, their attempt to escape violence failed as they arrived in California just in time to be witnesses to the violence of the Watts Riots in 1965. “In the rioting, which lasted five days, more than 34 people died, at least 1,000 were wounded, and an estimated $200 million in property was destroyed. An estimated 35,000 African Americans took part in the riot, which required 16,000 National Guardsmen, county deputies and city police to put down” (Cozzens, 2006).
In discussing these issues, Marshall said, “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go” (Kerry James Marshall, 2005). In his approach to art, Marshall demonstrates what Coomarawaamy says in Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art when the use of art is described as “the good of man, the good of society, and in particular the good of an individual requirement” (1956).
Unlike most of mainstream America, the message Marshall is trying to send is that intuition counts. Within his work, he represents the bisociative concepts that contribute to the process of creativity and audience association discussed in (Rothenberg & Hausman (1976). He sees his purpose in art as providing a role model for black children that exists outside of the realm of the blue collar worker. “When I started out as an artist, there were books on the work of black artists that I had seen in the library, but when I went to the museums, I hardly ever, if ever, saw any of that work.
And if I saw it, it existed in the museum on such a modest scale that it never had the same kind of imposing presence that a lot of the big major works you saw in museums seemed to have” (Rowell, 1998). The artistic landscape of the early 1980s into which Marshall launched himself was characterized by a great deal of medium experimentation, including a large degree of collage work and digital interpretation mixed with elements of painting and a strong sense of spontaneity and fun.
A great deal of Marshall’s art is dedicated to addressing the positive and negative elements of black life at the same time, illustrating the complex inner truth of his race. In his work, Marshall challenges his viewer to see the images he presents as they really are, without automatically assigning the image a socially-conditioned impression of negativity. “The reason why I painted them [the characters in his paintings] as black as they are was so that they operate as rhetorical figures.
They are literally and rhetorically black in the same way that we describe ourselves as black people in America; we use that extreme position to designate ourselves in contrast to a white power structure of the country or the white mainstream” (Rowell, 1998). His paintings, such as “Better Homes and Gardens”, depict very black characters going about typical suburban lifestyles in settings that often appear to be the typical suburban neighborhood but, on closer inspection, are frequently revealed to be something entirely different. The results manage to portray a number of contradictions within an image that nevertheless leaves its viewer with a sense of hope and optimism for the future.
Conclusion
From his background and approach, one can understand how Kerry James Marshall manages to combine several ideas together to deliver a powerful message of oppression, hope, possibility and despair. To express these ideas, Marshall insists every aspect of the piece must speak to the issue it is created to address, including the medium used for its creation incorporating wire fencing material, fabric or other materials into the paint as a means of keeping things real.
Rather than joining the ranks of his fellow black artists who embraced full abstraction as a means of breaking into the mainstream art world by virtue of their paintings being unrecognized as coming from a black artist per se, Marshall has worked to be recognized as a black painter and as a mainstream artist at one and the same time. In doing so, he has managed to gain the respect of the art community as well as fulfill his goals of giving other black children a role model to look up to.
Works Cited
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art. Dover, 1956.
Cozzens, Lisa. “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Civil Rights Movement. (2006). Web.
“Kerry James Marshall.” Art21. (2005). Web.
Rothenberg, Albert & Carl R. Hausman. The Creativity Question. Duke University Press, 1976.
Rowell, Charles. “An Interview with Kerry James Marshall.” Callaloo. (Vol. 21, N. 1, 1998), 263-72.
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