Kerry James Marshall: Being an Artist | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #018: Kerry James Marshall discusses three recent paintings, all Untitled (2008), during the installation of his exhibition Black Romantic at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Kerry James Marshall's work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to folk art. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness.

Kerry James Marshall is featured in the Season 1 (2001) episode Identity of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

Learn more about Kerry James Marshall: http://www.art21.org/artists/kerry-james-marshall

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Kerry James Marshall. Thanks: Jack Shainman Gallery.

If you go back and read
Langston Hughes's essay from 1929,

I think it was,
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."

He opens it with a question from a young poet who approaches him and says,

"I don't wanna be a black poet, I just wanna be a poet."

But what does that mean, really?

In his essay, he says,

what that artist is really saying is,
"I wanna be a white artist."

Because they are not burdened by the problem of race.

To not be called a Black artist
seems to perform some kind of

liberating function in the minds of a lot of people.

So who needs to not know,

or who needs to not think of you as a Black artist

in order for you to become a real artist?

The painting is the painting.

Black painters have done all kinds of work all the time.

So it's not a question of whether they represent or whether they don't represent.

But it's the treatment of
whichever of those forms they engage in.

That's what determines the value of the work.

Not whether you call them a Black artist or not.