Kerry James Marshall

Dynamic Chicago-based artist, MacArthur Fellow, and past Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipient Kerry James Marshall visits to discuss his career and the importance of art education. An internationally renowned painter, master draftsman, photographer, video maker, and sculptor, Marshall carries forward the figurative tradition on view in Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection while drawing our attention to race, representation, and the invisibility of African Americans in Western art history. He also shares his thoughts on the influence of the modern masters featured in Transfigurations in a video on view in the galleries’ reading room as part of the exhibition. Marshall’s work has been featured at the center multiple times, including in the solo exhibition Every Beat of My Heart (2008) and last fall as part of Blues for Smoke (2013). This talk also serves as the keynote address for the 2014 Ohio Art Education Association conference.

Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and is now based in Chicago. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum of Harlem; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Columbus Museum of Art. Recently the subject of the traveling retrospective Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, his work has also been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and in other exhibitions from coast to coast and abroad.

Cosponsored by the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Ohio Art Education Association.