It's a tall order to capture the full sweep of history on a single canvas. But that seems to be the goal of Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall, who is making history in his own right as the first living African-American artist to be given a solo show at Washington's National Gallery of Art.
National Gallery of Art, Washington/Gift of the Collectors CommitteeKerry James Marshall's 'Great America' (1994) is on view at Washington's National Gallery of Art.
The history genre has had its stars, such as 18th-century painters Jacques-Louis David and Francisco Goya, with their roiling battle scenes. Mr. Marshall's wall-size paintings of everyday life often hint at the entire arc of the African-American experience, from slavery to the Civil Rights movement and beyond.
The National Gallery exhibit of more than 30 artworks, "In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall," is on view through Dec. 7 and includes some of the artist's best-known works, such as 1995's "Our Town," the painter's unsettling riposte to Thornton Wilder's idyllically set 1938 play of the same name.
Mr. Marshall's version depicts a seemingly cheery suburban neighborhood rimmed with a white-picket fence but shows a pair of African-American children fleeing the scene, their faces frozen in cryptic terror. The painting, which Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton bought at auction for $782,500 four years ago for her Arkansas museum Crystal Bridges, conjures questions that aren't easy to answer about the inclusiveness of upwardly mobile America, said James Meyer, associate curator at the National Gallery.
"Kerry's work is politically potent without telling you what to think," Mr. Meyer added. "That's a tough note to hit well, but he does it—I think he's one of the best painters in America, period."
Another exhibit highlight is "Great America," an amusement park scene from 1994 owned by the National Gallery that depicts a group of black people aboard a "Tunnel of Love" boat ride.
At first glance, the work's brightly colored palette makes everything seem merry, but Mr. Marshall fills his tunnel with ghostly, hooded shapes that evoke the Ku Klux Klan. The passengers are also crammed into the boat in a way that's reminiscent of the Middle Passage, the centurieslong slave trade that involved shipping kidnapped Africans to the New World.
In an interview, Mr. Marshall said the challenge of a history painting comes in finding fresh ways to embed symbolic imagery throughout one universally relatable scene, such as that amusement-park ride. The reward for the viewer, he added, lies in "unpacking it all."
Mr. Marshall's past merits a little unfurling as well. Born the son of a hospital janitor in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955, he first encountered art in a scrapbook that his African-American kindergarten teacher kept in her desk and occasionally showed to students who exhibited good behavior. Mr. Marshall was captivated by the book's collage of greeting cards, photographs and cartoons, a more-is-more aesthetic that carries over into his paintings today.
In 1963, racists bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four black girls and galvanizing the civil-rights movement. Mr. Marshall's mother, who knew the family of one of the girls, soon after told him that their own family was moving to Los Angeles—specifically a housing project in Watts. (Two years later, Watts would became famous as the site of race riots.)
Mr. Marshall said it was in Watts, and later in the city's troubled South Central neighborhood, that he began watching art shows on television and teaching himself how to draw comic-book heroes without tracing them first.
In the seventh grade, a teacher gave him a tour of Charles Wilbert White's studio at the Otis College of Art and Design. (Mr. White, who died in 1979, was a realist who portrayed black America in prints and murals.) "Going into that room changed my life," Mr. Marshall said in the interview. Surrounded by easels and sketches and finished artworks, Mr. Marshall saw the life he wanted. He went home, cut a hole in his parents' garage for added light and turned it into a studio of his own.
By the time he was 25, the artist had put himself through college, read a library's worth of history books and created the painting that would become his imaginative breakthrough, an inky black self-portrait called "Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self." The work's silhouette style got the attention of a gallery owner and would later influence rising-star artists like Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker, who is known for her own silhouette art.
"I've always been plagued by levels of doubt," Mr. Marshall said, "wondering if the people who make decisions about my chances of participating in the art world know more about things than me. So I've always felt like I had to know my history better than anyone—I had to make myself invulnerable."
-By Kelly Crow