Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble

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Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble

Artist Kerry James Marshall (American, born 1955)

Date1990

DimensionsMat: 9 7/8 × 8 1/4 × 1/16 in. (25.1 × 21 × 0.2 cm)

Mediumacrylic on miniature burned American flag mounted to four-ply mat board

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased 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

Not on View

Label TextKerry 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.