Rennie Museum, Vancouver
2018
June 2–November 3, 2018
Rennie Museum in Vancouver presented Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, its first solo exhibition of the artist. Surveying more than thirty works created over three decades, this presentation included seminal paintings and sculptures drawn exclusively from the Rennie Collection.
Described by critic Holland Cotter as "one of the great history painters of our time," Marshall is well known for his paintings depicting actual and imagined events from African-American history. Among the paintings on view marking significant developments in the artist’s practice was Invisible Man (1986)—taking its name from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel—an early example of Marshall’s deft black on black tonal technique portraying at once the premise of black invisibility and the power of visualizing blackness. Developed from a series that focuses on public housing projects in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, the monumental canvas Garden Party (2004–2013) demonstrates Marshall’s synthesis of different painterly genres and traditions into a backyard scene that the artist returned to again and again to rework and reimagine. Also on view together for the first time in North America, three monumental eighteen-foot-wide paintings Untitled (Red) (2011), Untitled (Black) (2012), and Untitled (Green) (2012) echo the form of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967) while employing the colors of the Pan African flag. Major sculptural works in the show includedthe large-scale installation Untitled (Black Power Stamps) (1998)—the first piece by Marshall to enter the Rennie Collection—and Wake (2003–2005), which references the first landing of African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.
Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works was the artist’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver since 2010, when the city’s Art Gallery presented some twenty paintings and prints in his debut solo show in Canada. For art historian Jordan Kantor, that exhibition provided "a valuable chance to take stock of Marshall’s position vis-à-vis the histories of painting he strategically engages. The picture that emerges . . . is of an artist committed to using the formal conventions of European picturemaking in and of themselves and as springboards for contemporary political and cultural commentary." The artist’s sculpture As Seen on TV (1998–2000) was included in the group show Winter 2015 at Rennie Museum two years ago.
From 2016 to 2017, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, an unprecedented American museum retrospective surveying thirty-five years of the artist’s work, traveled from theMuseum of Contemporary Art Chicago toThe Met Breuer in New York before concluding its critically acclaimed tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Image: Installation view, Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, Rennie Museum, Vancouver, 2018. Courtesy Rennie Museum. Photo by Blaine Campbell.