Kerry James Marshall

The haunting Invisible Man, 1986, stands near the exhibition’s entrance, its most perceptible elements the whites of a pair of eyes and a Cheshire cat–like grin. Kerry James Marshall’s signature ink-black skin tone against an equally black background dematerializes the figure, emphasizing notions of invisibility. The work strikingly contrasts the proceeding paintings in this arresting career retrospective, titled “Mastry,” which celebrates African American visibility in part through figures almost Greco-Roman in their solidity and stoic tranquility.

Protected, private, or personal spaces are frequently backdrops for the scenes on view. Barbershops and beauty salons, in the style of Dutch and Flemish history paintings, are replete with haunting anamorphic vanitas images; sweeping pastoral tableaux depict the Nickerson Gardens in LA, where Marshall grew up, as well as multiple public housing projects in Chicago. Rococo scenes of romantic bliss follow, splayed with glittery flocking and unfurling festoons, while comfortable middle-class interiors are lined with winged portraits of Civil Rights martyrs, including John F. and Robert Kennedy as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

In a recent portraiture-driven phase that illustrates his preference for capturing the complexity of his subjects and the fullness of their lives, Marshall painted Harriet Tubman on her wedding day and Fred Hampton in the dark morning just prior to his assassination. Both works distill intimate and poetic moments surrounding the decisive ones that make up their reputations.

For more than three decades, Marshall has been replacing visual culture’s objectified, obfuscated, or sensationalized representations of African Americans with thoughtful, empowering ones by systematically reworking the art-historical canon. Beyond visibility, or even inclusion however, this exhibition’s crowning achievement is the tracking of Marshall’s evolution from an artist experimenting with literal legibility in Invisible Man to one exposing the privilege inherent in illegibility in subsequent works. His portraits of Tubman and Hampton are prime examples, foregoing mainstream narratives and received reference points in favor of something more multifaceted and mysterious. By romanticizing the banal, radicalizing the domestic, and humanizing the revered, “Mastry” manages to simultaneously resist and reshape convention.