Kerry James Marshall recently made headlines for the record-breaking $21.1m sale of his 1997 painting Past Times. Known for his large-scale, highly stylized, allegorical paintings of African-American life, Marshall uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, and photography to comment on the history of black identity both in the United States and in Western art.
Marshall was born in Alabama in 1955 and grew up in Watts, Los Angeles. He is a 1978 graduate of the Otis College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in Chicago. In his PBS Art21 special Marshall said, “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go…”
A major survey exhibition, Kerry James Marshall: MASTRY toured the country in 2016-2017, stopping at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Met Breuer, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Marshall has work in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Birmingham Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.