Kerry James Marshall
Born 1955, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.A.
Lives and works in Chicago

For RYTHM MASTR, Marshall created a written and illustrated newspaper comic strip that blocks out the glass windows of the display cases in the museum’s gallery. Marshall takes his cue from inner city environments where old newspapers are recycled as makeshift window curtains to hide the view into empty buildings. Here the "recycled" newspapers are in fact the artist’s work but are presented in a seemingly random arrangement of discarded pages. Marshall’s comic book story merges contemporary urban reality with ancient lore by pitting African archetypes against the forces of cybertechnology. His installation elevates the commonplace medium of newspaper to a more sophisticated form of visual art. As his collagelike arrangement of overlapping drawings lit from behind obscures the details of the representational narrative, the installation functions as a three- dimensional geometric abstract pattern.

Kerry James Marshall, RYTHM MASTR, 1999, site specific installation, 20 double-page, two-sided printed newspaper comics

Kerry James Marshall, RYTHM MASTR, 1999, site specific installation, 20 double-page, two-sided printed newspaper comics

Kerry James Marshall, RYTHM MASTR, 1999 (installation view) 20 double-page, two-sided printed newspaper comics

Kerry James Marshall’s work has been exhibited in group shows in the United States for over twenty years and in international exhibitions such as documenta X, Kassel (1997) and the traveling exhibition Postcards from Black America: Contemporary African American Art, De Beyerd, Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst, Breda, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, and Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (1998). His work appeared in About Place: Recent Art of the Americas, The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); Art in Chicago 1945-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1996); and Biennial Exhibition and Heart, Mind, Body, Soul: American Art in the 1990s, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1997). Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California (1984); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1986); and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (1993, 1995, 1999). In 1994 Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio, organized an exhibition of his work entitled Telling Stories, Selected Paintings, which traveled to Gallery of Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas; Gallery 210, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pennsylvania; and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An exhibition of Marshall’s work, organized by Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998), traveled to Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; Santa Monica Museum of Art, California; and Boise Museum of Art, Idaho. In 1997 Marshall was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant.

Education
1978 Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles

Selected Further Reading
Orlando Museum of Art, Florida. Currents 6: Kerry James Marshall, A Narrative of Everyday (1998). Exhibition brochure, text by Sue Scott.

Molesworth, Helen. “Project America.” Frieze, no. 40 (May 1998): 72-75.

Holg, Garrett. “Realism Today: ‘Stuff Your Eyes with Wonder.’” Artnews 97, no. 3 (March 1998): 154-56.

Reid, Calvin. “Kerry James Marshall.” Bomb, no. 62 (winter 1998): 40-47, cover.

Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio, in association with Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pennsylvania. Kerry James Marshall: Telling Stories, Selected Paintings (1994). Exhibition catalogue, text by Terrie Sultan.