France: American artist Kerry James Marshall celebrated at the Museum of Modern Art

Artist Kerry James Marshall at the Chicago Cultural Center, on December 4, 2017. -

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Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times/AP

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France

"The Histories", a traveling retrospective of American painter Kerry James Marshall, at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, France.

The artist explores "négritude" through his paintings. He highlights Black people in often mundane contexts of daily life. Far from the clichés that only presented the subjects through a degrading lens: domestics and slaves.

In Marshall's work, the skin color of his characters is represented in jet black. The painter sees himself as an advocate for Blackness.

"Black is not a dead end. It is not a non-color. It is something that can be as complex and as rich as any other color one could use to make a painting. That is why I represent my characters mainly in black: I want to counter the idea that black is not a color and that it is not complex.", explains Kerry James Marshall.

A body of work that has earned him consideration as the spearhead of the representation of Black characters in major Western galleries. A pioneering status that he struggles to accept.

"I think there were other artists before him who also placed Black life at the heart of their work. Artists he knows and respects a great deal, for example Jacob Lawrence or many artists before him. But he may be the first to work on a truly grand scale. He is therefore inspired by the size and scope of the paintings one can, for example, see in Paris: Géricault, Courbet, Manet or Seurat. I think his ambition was to place Black life at the center, but on such a scale that these works could be seen in major museums by a wide audience, allowing everyone to contemplate them, reflect on them and appreciate them simultaneously.", said Mark Godfrey, curator of the exhibition.

The artist is precisely inviting the public to better explore his works by going beyond the characters' color.

“When you see the figures in my paintings, you immediately know that they are Black figures. You can’t say anything else about them. They are Black. But then, you have to go beyond that to be interested in everything that is happening in the painting and in what their position in that painting represents, in a way. That is what I do,” says Kerry James Marshall, American painter.

Marshall, 70, only had his first major retrospective ten years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.