'When you find yourself, your culture and history is of having been subjugated, enslaved and colonised, you got to fix that'
The artist Kerry James Marshall became fascinated by art history at a young age, during art lessons at school in the South Central area of Los Angeles—this was the early 1960s, just before the racially fuelled, six-day-long Watt Riots broke out in 1965.
An early hero of his was an artist called Charles White who drew, painted and made vast murals of black people. White was a giant to younger black artists but it troubled Marshall when he studied art history books and White's name never appeared.
"When I looked at his work it seemed as good as something anyone else ever made, and better than a lot of things other people made, but how come he's invisible to art history? I became really obsessed with trying to understand why some artists were in art history and other artists were not," he says.
Now 59, Marshall's a serious speaker, informed and open about his work. A painter admired by peers such as Luc Tuymans, he paints consciously, deliberately. "It’s not about sensibility, it’s about choice," he says, "and that choice is always intellectual."
In Marshall's series of new paintings, he places the black artist, and subject, back in art history. A desire to be noticed rests within his work, and motivation. Noticed as an artist, and for the figures in his paintings to be noticed, for an imagined and alternative art history, in which black subjects and artists are included, and celebrated.
The paintings are a joy to look at, colourful, and sexy with nudes or clothed figures in everyday settings: the garden, a diner, lounged on a sofa with the television’s remote control. As domestic as this sounds, the images refer to major figures in art history: Manet's Olympia watches television, there’s a girl with a pearl earring like Vermeer's, and a complicated scene of a woman painter and model refers to Velazquez's painting Las Meninas. The works explore the entire history of painting, always with a black subject at the centre, but the layers of meaning go beyond art history. Despite their joyful surface, Marshall's work has a serious point to make.