Kerry James Marshall
1955
Kerry James Marshall (1955, Birmingham, United States) is renowned for his revolutionary portraits of Black subjects, Marshall’s work interrogates Western art history – from the Renaissance to 20th-century American Abstraction – challenging and recontextualizing the canon to include themes and depictions that have been historically omitted. Born in Birmingham at the start of the American civil rights movement, and later moving to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles just a few years before the Watts uprising, Marshall’s work is inspired by his own personal history as well as what he interprets to be recurring elements of the American experience, both past and present.
