Kerry James Marshall: The Complete Prints

Text by Susan Tallman

A complete survey of Marshall’s prints from the 1970s to the present, with many previously unseen works

Kerry James Marshall is famed for his beautifully executed paintings that address the under-representation of the Black figure in the Western pictorial tradition. Though best known as a painter, Marshall has throughout his career also produced a vast graphic oeuvre that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. Marshall spent his youth building his craft in drawing and painting, but also in wood engraving and printing; by his mid-twenties, he recalls, "I could do woodcuts, etchings, aquatints." Most of his prints have been produced not in professional print workshops but by the artist, working alone in his studio. They range from images the size of postcards to his 50-foot-long, 12-panel woodcut Untitled (1998–99), to iterations of his ongoing magnum opus Rythm Mastr. And while some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist’s archive and are unknown to the public. This catalogue raisonné offers the first public account of these important works and the first in-depth study of the role of printed images and print processes in Marshall’s work as a whole.

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