The Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art (LACMA) has been gifted the small yet powerful Kerry James Marshall work A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980. The piece, which was made with egg tempera on paper, depicts the bust of a black male rendered almost completely in shades of black. The figure’s features are hard to discern, save for the whites of his eyes, his gap-toothed smile, and his undershirt.

Collector Steven Lebowitz, bought the painting for $850 from the Koplin Gallery in Culver City, California, in 1984. According to the Los Angeles Times, Lebowitz first displayed the work in the bar at his home but eventually moved it to his bathroom after guests thought it was offensive. The piece stayed in his washroom for the next twenty-five years.

Painted when he was twenty-five, the work marks a major transition for the artist. “Everything changed when I made that painting,” Marshall told Wyatt Mason of the New York Times. It sparked his shift from collage to painting and his interest in countering sterotypes by creating work that shows different facets of the African American experience. It was included in a landmark retrospective of the artist’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016 before it traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Commenting on the work in a review of the exhibition in the January 2017 issue of Artforum, Carroll Dunham wrote: “This little jewel claimed a territory in which abstract formal values, intensity of facture, and personal symbolism collide, while different notions of blackness, as subject, condition, and material reality, are conflated. Over the course of the next decade, Marshall, with increasing confidence, deployed similar images embedded in a field of personally and culturally symbolic icons that gradually matured into a more narrative form of inquiry.”

The work is on view in “Life Model: Charles White and His Students,” an exhibition at LACMA’s satellite gallery at Charles White Elementary School, formerly Otis Art Institute, which Marshall graduated from in 1978.