Fine Art PR Publicity Announcements News and Information
Fine Art PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

National Gallery of Art Acquires Kerry James Marshall Painting – Great America

At its annual meeting in April, the Collectors Committee of the National Gallery of Art made possible the acquisition of Great America (1994) by Kerry James Marshall—the Gallery’s first painting by this major midcareer artist. A devoted student of the human figure and the history of art, Marshall draws upon the experience of African Americans to create imposing, contemporary history paintings.


Kerry James Marshall, American, b. 1955, Great America, 1994, acrylic and collage on canvas, overall: 261.62 x 289.56 cm (103 x 114 in.), Gift of the Collectors Committee

Marshall’s mature career can be dated to 1980, when, inspired by the opening lines of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, he developed his signature motif of a dark, near-silhouetted figure in A Portrait of the Artist as His Former Self. Refusing both negative and positive stereotypes of black people, Marshall’s figures of “extreme blackness” operate, he explains, “right on the borderline,” forcing the viewer to find nuance and articulation within only apparently black forms. This strategy has been influential for younger artists, including Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon.

Great America is contemporaneous with Marshall’s well-known Garden Project (1994–1995), a series of paintings based on housing projects with “gardens” in their names, such as Nickerson Gardens in Watts, where he grew up. In those works, Marshall sought to convey the dignity and complexity of lives set within difficult circumstances. In Great America he re-imagines a boat ride into the haunted tunnel of an amusement park as the Middle Passage of slaves from Africa to the New World. What might in other hands be a work of heavy irony becomes instead a delicate interweaving of the histories of painting and race. The painting, which is stretched directly onto the wall, creates a screen or backdrop onto which viewers project their own associations triggered by the diaphanous yet powerful imagery.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Marshall grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Otis Art Institute. After spending time as a fellow at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he moved to Chicago in 1987, where he still lives and works.

www.nga.gov

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