Kerry James Marshall valuation
Paints Black figures in the grand manner of history painting, on the scale museums reserve for masterpieces.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grew up in Los Angeles, from 1963 in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts.
What a work by Kerry James Marshall is worth
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Bio
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grew up in Los Angeles, from 1963 in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts. He began drawing from the figure in high school under the social realist painter Charles White, who remained a mentor through his student years, and graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 1978. He taught painting at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1993 to 2006 and has lived and worked in Chicago for most of his career. His figures are painted an uncompromising black and set in scenes of domestic life, leisure and history, and his Garden Project paintings of the mid-1990s took the names of Chicago's housing projects as their subject. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.
Marshall works slowly, and his large paintings are mostly in museums or long-held collections, so they rarely come up for sale. Works on paper, prints and smaller paintings make up most of what appears. Provenance through his galleries and exhibition history are the first things a buyer looks for.
Charles White, the Garden Project and Mastry
Mastry, a retrospective organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016, travelled to the Met Breuer in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In 2017 Time named him among the hundred most influential people in the world.
His other series include Lost Boys, portraits of young Black men from the shoulders up, and Souvenir, domestic interiors commemorating the civil rights era.
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