Kerry James Marshall has built his career around a defining ambition: to place Black people at the center of painting traditions that have too often excluded them. Marshall was born on 17 October 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in South Central Los Angeles; he grew up amid the civil rights era’s struggles and transformations. Those experiences helped shape an artistic practice in which Black life commands attention on its own terms. He graduated from the Otis Art Institute in 1978 and is based in Chicago.
Marshall’s paintings bring the scale and ambition of European history painting into conversation with African American experience. His subjects inhabit gardens, homes, beauty salons and public housing developments; they fall in love, work, rest and imagine their futures. Rendered in emphatically black tones, his figures assert their presence within compositions that draw on centuries of representational art while refusing its inherited exclusions. Beauty, pleasure and ordinary experience become subjects worthy of sustained attention and monumental treatment.
That vision found a celebrated expression in Past Times (1997), a large-scale painting of Black Americans enjoying a park beside the water. Picnicking, golf, waterskiing and music animate a scene that reworks the pastoral tradition, placing Black leisure within a pictorial world historically associated with white privilege. Its subject is not simply access to recreation, but the freedom to occupy an idyllic landscape without apology or explanation.
On 16 May 2018, Past Times sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $21.1 million, including fees. Music entrepreneur Sean Combs purchased it, establishing a record for Marshall and, at the time, the highest auction price for a work by a living African American artist. The distinction concerned the resale value of his work—not a payment of that amount to Marshall himself.
The sale brought extraordinary public attention to a project Marshall had pursued for decades. Yet his art’s significance extends beyond the market’s recognition. His paintings challenge who belongs in museums, whose experiences merit ambitious representation, and who gets to stand at the center of the picture. Rather than treating Black presence as an addition to an established story, Marshall makes it fundamental to the story painting can tell.
Meserette’s note: Kerry James Marshall does not maintain a personal, official website. You can find listed public collections and available works through his representing galleries: the Jack Shainman Gallery and David Zwirner.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/23/kerry-james-marshall-past-time-painting-record-breaking
https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2016/12/02/kerry-james-marshall-at-the-met-my-love-of-art-making-came-from-leonardo-and-michelangelo-an-interview/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23717428078&gbraid=0AAAAACex8dISlbjDkxVCP0UcKjXemRimn&gclid=CjwKCAjwuczWBhA9EiwAYGgEocXea98APJpWIKIOV292YD5WDkAT_4Mwp_WqmWE2RxZTU_wEqWhjYhoCpZwQAvD_BwE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_James_Marshall
