Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
Texts by Elizabeth Alexander, Ian Alteveer, Helen Molesworth, Dieter Roelstraete, and Abigail Winograd
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry is the definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.
Publisher: Skira Rizzoli
Artists: Kerry James Marshall
Contributors: Elizabeth Alexander, Ian Alteveer, Helen Molesworth, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Winograd
Printer: Die Keure, Belgium
Publication Date: 2016
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9 x 12 in (22.9 x 30.5 cm)
Pages: 288 pages
ISBN: 9780847848331
Retail: $65 | £45
Status: Available
Kerry James Marshall
With a career spanning almost three decades, Kerry James Marshall is well known for his paintings depicting actual and imagined events from African-American history. His complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes synthesize different traditions and genres, while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Marshall also produces drawings in the style of comic books, sculptural installations, photography, and video. As with his paintings, these works accumulate various stylistic influences to address the historiography of black art, while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that they are not inherently partisan because their subjects are black.
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher.
Ian Alteveer
Ian Alteveer is associate curator in the department of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Helen Molesworth
Helen Molesworth is a Los Angeles–based writer, podcaster, and curator. Her major museum exhibitions include: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, and Work Ethic. She has organized monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.
Dieter Roelstraete
Dieter Roelstraete is a curator of Documenta 14 and the former Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA).
Abigail Winograd
Abigail Winograd is a research associate at the MCA.