MASTRY at MCA: Kerry James Marshall's Survey Show Takes the Cake

There is no argument the Museum of Contemporary Art has seen a few rough years. Following the desperate cash cow that was DAVID BOWIE IS, and the deflated UNBOUND: CONTEMPORARY ART AFTER FRIDA KAHLO, the closing of Kerry James Marshall’s MASTRY was a thirst-quenching moment for Chicago.

The survey of Marshall’s work included nearly 80 large-scale paintings installed in 15 separate rooms with shoulder-to-shoulder visitors, quieted by the simple grandness of the show and installation. The topic is realism, assimilation, blackness, invisibility, and exclusion. The paintings were huge. Marshall is a master painter. The formal aspects of the painting are just as powerful as their charges.

The first few paintings on view are older in respect to the show, all portraits of characters born out of racist archetype deeply rooted in the history of the civil rights movement and directly linked to current racial issues. Marshall is speaking specifically to invisibility here, as the characters are literally represented as invisible, dark skin on a dark background. In Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum, painted in 1981, the vacuum is the subject of the painting, and the portrait noted in the title is nearly indistinguishable from a black rectangle on the wall, with only a few not-so-subtle portrait features rendered plainly like graphic symbols. The vacuum is unplugged. The painting is stark, and creates a direct association with the black figure in the portrait and the domestic object. The portrait is small and rendered in a thin black picture frame, further silencing and making-small the figure.

Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum, 1981, Acrylic on Canvas, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Museum purchase

In the next room, the paintings are slightly more fantastical, larger and utilize collage overtly, with scratchy paint and loaded symbols. Represented are Adam and Eve, rendered in ivory black, directly in opposition to the historical representation of the figures in painting, which has always been an un-strikingly colonialist white. There is a painting of a magician with symbols of bad luck at his feet. There is a painting of a big black woman, her body parts labeled, like a diagram of how a black woman figure can exist in a painting at all. This painting is pointing a finger at the lack of acknowledgement for anything non-white in the academic painting sphere, and how consistent this has been throughout the history of painting.

Marshall invited museum patrons to rifle through his personal image archive. 

To be clear, these paintings are not about painting, or critiquing painting politics, exclusively. This show is not just about race. Marshall is very much still painting young love, magic, death, ego, taste, scenes of daily life and personal struggle. This is what makes MASTRY so dynamic. It reaches a wide audience without sacrificing the topic of identity. These paintings are not made for a white audience. However, they allow white viewers to engage them, empathize with them, all the while never allowing the viewer to forget their position in respect to the painting and the painting’s subject.

SOB, SOB, 2003 Acrylic on fiberglass Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Museum purchase through the Lusita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

The diversity of topics and emotions in MASTRY is expansive, to say the least. There are comics, sweet romantic paintings, traditional academic paintings, woodcuts, collage and a deeply sorrowful black painting, titled Black Painting from 2003. Marshall isn’t just nodding to the black paintings of Reinhardt or Rauschenberg, Malevich or Motherwell. Marshall is mourning the loss of Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton and Black Panther party member Mark Clark, who were murdered by the Chicago Police and Cook County Sheriff's Office. The murders were not followed by police indictments. The 1969 tragedy has a direct relationship with recent events of police brutality and murder of black Americans.  

Ultimately, it is the best show MCA has curated in a very long time. MASTRY, masterful.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980 Egg tempera on paper, Steven and Deborah Lebowitz