School of Beauty, School of Culture by Kerry James Marshall (2012)

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.