Kerry James Marshall is one of the most honored artists working in Chicago.
In the last year, he received a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation plus an award from the California Institute of the Arts and the Herb Alpert Foundation; his large, complex paintings on African-American life also appeared in the Biennial of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the quinquennial Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
Given such acclaim from other places, Marshall has had few major exhibitions at home — which makes his show on the 1960s and the civil rights movement (opening Wednesday at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago) an even more special occasion.
The exhibition is a response from the artist to all his recent attention, for while Marshall has had a laserlike focus on painting, at 43 he also has had time to develop other interests that now can keep his art vital.
“The Ren show gave a great opportunity to open the work up,” Marshall says, “because I didn’t want to do another painting exhibition. Part of the reason was I have achieved a certain amount of success with the paintings and didn’t want to settle into satisfying a market just because there are a lot of people who want to buy them. So, since I’d always been interested in film and a lot of other things, it seemed important to me at this point to start bringing in some of them. I had never before shown painting and video or any two (media) at once, but at the Ren there will be both of those plus some sculpture and photography.”
The artists whom Marshall admires most — he calls them “the two greatest artists in history so far” — are Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp — which may seem an unlikely pairing given the prolificacy of the one and the scarcity of works from the other. But Marshall sees the two as fundamentally alike in the range of their interests, admiring how each used art as a tool for investigating a myriad of other things. To achieve such breadth is, for Marshall, what it means to be an artist.
Even so, from 1980 until the mid-1990s, he appeared to be single-minded in his dedication to painting, and most people who have seen his work think of him primarily as a painter.
“I didn’t become an artist because I wanted anything from it,” says Marshall. “I still don’t want any more from my practice as an artist than to see what I can do. If you’re interested in the idea of art, you’re exploring possibilities. And for a long time one of the possibilities I was anxious to explore was the viability of painting.
“When I was in school (at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s), all I heard was that painting was archaic and didn’t have a useful function anymore in the discourse of artmaking. Well, I could accept that or I could test it. I decided to test it, to the best of my ability see if it was still possible to make work in painting that could not only affect people but also could extend the dialogue of visual representation in the whole art world.”
As a child in Birmingham, Ala., Marshall was a voracious viewer of art through reproductions in the books of his grammar school library. Rembrandt, Raphael, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Holbein, Durer and Goya were his heroes. All had narrative elements in their work, and that proved decisive for Marshall’s own painting.
Similarly influential was a television show he watched each Saturday morning. Called “John Nagy’s Learn to Draw,” the program demonstrated how proficiency in drawing came from learning how to treat three basic shapes, the circle, square and triangle. From this, Marshall discovered art had a strong formal foundation, encouraging the sound organization that stayed with his work.
While in junior high school in Los Angeles, he met the famous African-American artist Charles White. Marshall knew of him because of an entry in a book titled “Great Negroes Past and Present,” but the first encounter with an important contemporary artist — and the friendship that eventually developed — meant White’s kind of painting would serve as an example for Marshall well into adulthood.
“I think I always wanted to work with narrative,” Marshall says. “Part of the reason was that narratives were common to the artists I started looking at, and when I met Charles White, the work he did, while not literally narrative, seemed to be about something with cultural, historical or social significance. That plus my own circumstances — coming from Birmingham, moving to Watts, growing up in South Central Los Angeles — gave me a sense that if art were going to matter it had to be about things that mattered in the world. All the events that swirled around me would eventually become the dominant subject of the work I would do
“I experimented with abstraction and, to be honest, it seemed easier than (figurative painting), which early on I couldn’t do. So it was more interesting to me to learn how to do the thing that seemed the hardest, because it looked like I could do the other thing anytime. When I went to the Otis Art Institute (after Los Angeles City College), there were a lot of people doing conceptual work, but to me it was not an option to go on to those strategies without first being able to draw and paint well because I understood how difficult it was to make really good paintings.”
It was difficult for Marshall because he did not abandon the history of painting that preceded him; on the contrary, he felt a deep awareness that all of it must be incorporated into anything he attempted. Which meant the artist had to achieve proficiency both technically and historically, mastering not only the materials and forms of painting but also an understanding of why such materials and forms developed. Only after internalizing this knowledge did Marshall think he could contribute something to a contemporary dialog.
The process took him more than a decade, during which he served a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Marshall met his future wife, actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, with whom he relocated to live and work on the South Side of Chicago. In the same period, he became familiar with film, mastering the creative possibilities slowly and by stealth, for he did not exhibit any of his film or video efforts until a work-in-progress last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
“I operated the same way with film as with painting,” Marshall says, “spending a lot of time just to see what the medium could do. Through this you develop a certain familiarity. Then, when you think you can understand the medium, you can start doing something with it. That was how I treated video as well.”
Marshall’s breakthrough painting was the 1993 canvas titled “The Lost Boys.” It has a classical compositional model but incorporates devices borrowed from abstract painting, patterns from popular sources and elements common to folk art. It was the first piece in which Marshall had felt the mastery of artistic modes that was necessary to have such disparate elements work cohesively.
“With that painting I understood I had taken in enough of the history of painting to be able to use those elements in a way that came out mine,” Marshall says. “That was what I had been working toward, and almost all the time until then I spent being concerned primarily with acquiring levels of skill.
“I think there are only two reasons to make paintings: You make them because you want to learn more about making paintings, and you make them because you have something that you think really needs to be said. All of my developmental time I knew what I wanted to say but also knew I wasn’t quite capable of saying it. So I figured I would focus on how to get it said; then everything would fall into place. Now I’m capable of doing just about anything I want to do. But once you’re there, that could be the end of the line. Or you could find ways to make things difficult again. That’s where I am today.”
All the pieces at the Renaissance Society are unified by a general idea of souvenirs and commemorations. Three paintings commemorate the unsung dead of the civil rights movement through forms borrowed from a kitsch souvenir banner. A video installation — three parts in one — memorializes stereotypical representations of African-Americans through the recreation of a burial site. A plastic sculpture in the shape of a vase recalls a sign on the famous 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. And so it goes.
“When I first started making figurative compositions,” Marshall says, “I would try both to incorporate current events and to open up more imaginative possibilities because in spite of all the hardship and tragedy, the world is still phenomenal. Life is an amazing experience. I accept its incredible contradictions and don’t have a problem seeing pleasure and pain in the same space.
“If you take where I was born and the time I was born in — Birmingham, 1955 — you could assume a lot of things about my experience; if you used statistics, you certainly could paint a pretty bleak picture. But everything we understand about Birmingham back then wasn’t happening everywhere in Birmingham. And the people who lived there wouldn’t necessarily see it as bleak; it would be much more complicated. At the same time as all the statistical stuff, there’s another level of experience that transcends it. I’m interested in saying (through my work), `What you said was true, but then, there’s this other part too.’ “
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The opening reception for “Kerry James Marshall: Mementos” will be from 4 to 7 p.m. next Sunday at 5811 S. Ellis Ave.; an artist’s talk will begin at 5 p.m. in Kent Hall, 1020 E. 58th St. 773-702-8670.
