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The Sun Doth Move

I wake and Trump is still president and our basic rights are still being violated and sacred native ground is still being plundered but the sun is shining for the first time in days and so human nature being what it is I start smiling.The dystopia is now, and I can’t even imagine what our country will look like by spring, but today the air smells sweet and my permakitten is cupping her chin in her tiny paw and I accept that beauty flourishes as stubbornly as a weed in a city sidewalk. The key is appreciation for what remains beautiful, not dissociation from the many horrors we now must address. Otherwise, we’ll go madder than the madman who’s seized the reins of this country I love.

Kerry James Marshall’s American Dream

January 22, 2017 in Art Matters, Country Matters, Essays

Walking through the galleries of “Mastry,” the two-floor Kerry James Marshall retrospective at Met Breuer, the newest branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I flash on James Baldwin’s quote: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Certainly Marshall’s paintings, which I have visited three times in the last month, are profoundly American – proudly, gorgeously, defiantly. In a swoon of silver, brocade, and funeral banners, they embody the beautiful resistance that our country needs most right now – the revolution that has just recommenced. More than that, these paintings ask us to join the movement.

Born in Alabama in 1955, Marshall moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1963 – a classic midcentury migration of African American clans. He has said that his infatuation with Marvel comics began around the same time that he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and certainly both influences are evident in his work. Also evident is the Civil Rights movement, which grew up right along with the artist, often in the same place. He was in Birmingham when four young girls were killed in a bombing of a Baptist church, and was living in L.A.’s Watts section during its 1965 riots. Remaining in that city during his early adulthood, he knew founding members of the Crips gang and studied at the Otis Art Institute, where he opted to become a representational painter querying beauty tropes as well as the eye of the beholder.

Marshall has so much to say about the gaze. Continue Reading →