This spectacular work exemplifies an extraordinary career
of painting African American subjects and history in a manner that both
reveres and revises the Old Masters. Born in Birmingham before the Civil
Rights Act and having witnessed the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles in
1965, Marshall has long chronicled the African American experience. His
large narrative paintings feature only black figures–defiant and
celebratory assertions of blackness in a medium in which those subjects
have too often been invisible–and his exploration of art history
stretches from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction and
beyond. The result is a visually stunning body of work, both intimate
and monumental.
In Marshall's paintings, black residents occupy spaces that
are full of bloom and sunlight–a bucolic look that references the positivism that spurred the development of these sites and also
contradicts contemporary associations of despair and destitution that are commonly associated with large housing projects.
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