Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble
Artist: Kerry James Marshall (American, born 1955)
Date: 1990
Dimensions:
Mat: 9 7/8 × 8 1/4 × 1/16 in. (25.1 × 21 × 0.2 cm)
Medium: acrylic on miniature burned American flag mounted to four-ply mat board
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Jamar Art Fund of Marvin and Lenore Kobacker, the Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Barber Art Fund, the Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund, and the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott
Object number: 2022.22
Label Text:"The mode of Black figure representation I employ is a clear departure from most popular treatments of the Black body. I am trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful. It is my conviction that the most instrumental, insurgent painting for this moment must be of figures, and those figures must be black, unapologetically so."
Kerry James Marshall, who was born into the segregated South, experienced a pivotal turning point in his art after reading Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. As he explained, Ellison’s “description… of the condition of invisibility [of Black people in American society] literally changed everything for me. … [T]he notion of being and not-being, the simultaneity of presence and absence, was exactly what I had been trying to get at in my artwork.” Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble is an early example of Marshall’s figurative paintings meant to, as he said, “call attention to the absence of Black presence.”
Using his characteristic “unequivocally black” hue, Marshall painted this head on a miniature, charred American flag that Marshall himself burned—a provocative and charged action. The year Marshall created this work (1990), the Supreme Court invalidated a federal law against desecrating the flag, citing the prohibition as a violation of free speech. He also created the work amid the height of the 1980s and ’90s “culture wars,” in which there were ongoing polarizing debates around how to define culture in America. While Marshall does not consider himself or his work to be categorically political, he does challenge the way many people view the political in binary terms with little nuance—especially in terms of race and identity.
The work invites us to reflect and examine our own beliefs, assumptions, even biases.
Kerry James Marshall, who was born into the segregated South, experienced a pivotal turning point in his art after reading Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. As he explained, Ellison’s “description… of the condition of invisibility [of Black people in American society] literally changed everything for me. … [T]he notion of being and not-being, the simultaneity of presence and absence, was exactly what I had been trying to get at in my artwork.” Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble is an early example of Marshall’s figurative paintings meant to, as he said, “call attention to the absence of Black presence.”
Using his characteristic “unequivocally black” hue, Marshall painted this head on a miniature, charred American flag that Marshall himself burned—a provocative and charged action. The year Marshall created this work (1990), the Supreme Court invalidated a federal law against desecrating the flag, citing the prohibition as a violation of free speech. He also created the work amid the height of the 1980s and ’90s “culture wars,” in which there were ongoing polarizing debates around how to define culture in America. While Marshall does not consider himself or his work to be categorically political, he does challenge the way many people view the political in binary terms with little nuance—especially in terms of race and identity.
The work invites us to reflect and examine our own beliefs, assumptions, even biases.
On view