CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/1/2024

Kerry James Marshall, redefining Blackness

In celebration of Black History month, we're highlighting the work of Kerry James Marshall, certainly one of the greatest painters of his generation but also an innovative master printmaker. “Today, Marshall is one of the world’s most celebrated artists, hailed for having redefined Blackness as a visual device and cultural subject, as well as for opening new vistas on what pictorial art can be and do,” the noted art historian and critic Susan Tallman writes in her comprehensive new survey, Kerry James Marshall: The Complete Prints, 1976–2022. "His grand figurative paintings are often larger than the entire six-by-nine footprint of the room at the South Side Chicago YMCA … where he resided for three years. Yet some things remain the same: Black faces still anchor his images, and printing is still central to the enterprise. Like Rembrandt or Mary Cassatt or Edvard Munch, Marshall is a peintre-graveur—a painter who uses printmaking as a way of thinking, of aligning image and surface, of being in the world.” Featured image is the 1982 woodcut Nat, made from two pieces of found wood, printed in two hues of black, and inspired by the slave rebellion leader Nat Turner.