Featured artwork
2018
Presented in the exhibition David Zwirner: 25 Years, this group of works belong to the artist's ongoing Dailies series, originally conceived for the 1999 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Marshall, who has professed a deep love for cartoons and comics since his youth, sought in this project to address the absence of black superheroes, characters, and environments in mainstream comics. Comprising three parallel comic strips (Rythm Mastr, P-Van, and On The Stroll) that range from the quotidian to the fantastic, these narratives take place within the daily life of "Black Metropolis," the former nickname of the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville, where Marshall's studio is located. As the artist has described, “I’m trying to produce an epic story of every aspect of people’s lives, from romance to gang violence to poverty to cultural identity. All these things have to be wrapped up in a story with black kids at the center of all of those activities. So at every level of human interaction, they are participating rather than seeing the reflection of what other people are doing.”1
The Dailies project has taken on a variety of forms since its inception, from ink drawings and newsprint broadsides, to lightbox displays and a 2015 mural, Above the Line, for the High Line in New York.
1 Kerry James Marshall quoted in Ellen Tani, "The World of Groundbreaking Artist Kerry James Marshall," artsy.net (April 21, 2016).
Throughout a career spanning four decades, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) has continuously interrogated and addressed black identity and its absence from the Western art historical canon. Across painting and a variety of different media, his complex and multilayered portrayals synthesize disparate genres, while seeking to counter stereotypical representations.