KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, invitation, 1997
17,8 x 17,8 cm (unfolded 57 cm long)
3 fold leaflet, offset, text by Tina Yapelli
splendid condition
published by San Diego State University, San Diego, USA
€ 185,- plus € 12,- Track & Trace registered EU mail
inv.KJM 1073-pr

The paintings of Kerry James Marshall are figurative accompanied with a rough-hewn painterly realism with elements of collage, words in lively and highly patchy settings. Images and verbal statements in which the viewer is addressed about the role of the African American in society.

The challenge for Black artists in general is trying to find a place for themselves in an aesthetic regime or aesthetic system, and a history that did not include them as participants in the formulation of its authorizing idea. Here we are operating within a class structure that large number of Black artists don’t come from. The challenge has been trying to figure out a way to get inside, but to come in with imagery that has Black subject matter or Black subjects by a person who is Black. People felt like that particular specificity set limitations on how people were able to perceive the work because there is the notion that the Black body can never really be a universal body. If you come with the Black body in a picture, then people automatically tend to limit their perception of it, believing it is only relevant to Black people. A remedy to that marginalization for African American artists who wanted to be seen as just artists and not ‘Black artists’ was to do abstract work. Kerry James Marshall, interview in Frame, 2019
Ref. Frame, 2 November 2019