For much of his adult life, the artist Kerry James Marshall has been on a mission to redress a big omission: "When you go to an art museum," Marshall says, "the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent."
Marshall has spent 35 years working to rectify that absence, creating powerful paintings of black figures in everyday life and, often, in settings referencing earlier work by artists from the Renaissance to Edward Hopper and Frank Stella. Marshall, 61, has been rewarded for that effort with residencies, fellowships and other accolades, including a MacArthur grant in 1997 and the acquisition of his work by the likes of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Chicago-based artist’s first major U.S. retrospective, "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry," opens Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., one of three co-organizers of the show. The exhibition ran last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and this winter in New York at the Met Breuer. The New York Times called the show "smashing" and its subject "one of the great history painters of our time." The New York Review of Books and Artforum magazine put large images from the show on their January covers.
"I’ve been acutely aware that museums are behind their academic colleagues in terms of thinking of representation and people of color," MOCA chief curator Helen Molesworth says. "I find Kerry's paintings ravishing–they are drop dead, great paintings–and they have an extra level of reward for people who hold in their heads a history of Western painting."