Exploring Black Identity with Kerry James Marshall | Art21

<v ->We are at, in the 21st century,</v>

at the head of an ever-expanding past

or an ever-expanding history.

We only move into the 21st century

on the foundation of things

that have been established long, long ago.

The principles that govern the way

visual representation works 
are still the same principles

that governed the way they worked 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousands years ago.

Makes perfect sense to me

to go back to the origins of these things

and pick up from there,

to take up the challenge, really,

to find another way to make 
these things seem fresh,

even if they are not.

The painting "Many Mansions,"

which I finished back in 1995,

it's very classical structure 
that the imagery is hung on.

When I started out, the 
artists that I really admired,

people like Jericho, that whole 
genre of history painting,

that grand narrative style of painting

was something that I really 
wanted to position my work

in relation to.

And so in order to achieve 
a similar kind of authority

that those paintings had,

I had to adopt a similar structural format.

I think in general

the paintings have been really well received,

but there's a lingering controversy

around the sort of unequivocally black,

kind of emphatically black figures.

I wouldn't have done them if I didn't feel it,

but I tend to think having that extreme of color,

that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful.

And powerful.

The first painting I did was way back in 1980,

was a painting called "A Portrait of the Artist

as a Shadow of His Former Self."

and it was the first time 
I had used this simplified,

kind of reductive representation 
of a black figure.

And so that painting was the one

that established the black figure

as a mode of operating for me.

What I was thinking to do with my image

was to reclaim the image of 
blackness as an emblem of power.

And I think it still functions 
pretty much that same way.

(somber organ music)

I do a lot of different things,

but I don't find any of them incompatible,

because they all sort of reinforce each other.

It's like whether I'm using 
film, video, or anything else,

either I'm working with a set of conventions

that have already been established,

or I'm working against a set of conventions

that have already been established,

but the primary source

of my ideas about visual representation

come from pictorial 
representation through painting.

This light is actually going to sit

near here with a big sun on it.

(light switch clicks)
So it's gonna have its own light source.

Hi, can you give me a hand?

Because I want to push this back.

These houses actually are 
part of a project I'm doing

for a show at the Columbus Museum,

entitled "Illusions of Eden."

The theme I've chosen to work 
with is the theme of home,

and essentially staged it.

What I'm looking at, in a way,

is how impenetrable those places are

to people who are not on the inside.

The whole idea of us really being

in some ways obsessed at this point

with penetrating that wall,

finding out what other people are doing,

what's going on in their lives,

what's going on in their houses.

And is what's going on in their houses

what we expect to be there?

(train rattling)

This is, it's live, all the way live.

<v Guest>It is.</v>
(overlapping chatter)

<v ->This is the Bruce household.</v>

<v Guest>Oh, yeah.</v>
(overlapping chatter)

<v ->Oh!</v>
(guests laughing)

<v Kerry>Somebody's got to 
take up for your mother.

<v ->Yes.</v>
There we go.

But I didn't know it at first.

<v Guest>Now, Kerry, I don't have them.</v>

<v Guest>Go ahead. Go on.</v>

<v Kerry>That's a favorite.</v>

(Kerry laughing)

<v ->This was for my 74th birthday from Kerry,</v>

and it says, "What did you 
get Super T for her birthday?"

You see how super I am?

Super T!

It says, "Lots of love."

"Lots of love," and I like that.

<v ->The defining experience I had</v>

that made me understand

that being an artist was what I wanted to be

was that my kindergarten teacher

kept a scrapbook of old photographs

she had clipped out of magazines,

Christmas cards, Valentines cards, you know,

all manner of greeting cards, advertisements,

and things like that, and she kept that scrapbook,

and it was something that she only made available

to the kid who was best behaved that day.

And if you were really well-behaved,

you got to look at that scrapbook

while everybody else took their nap after recess.

And it really was that book.

It's like the day I got a 
chance to look at that book,

it really changed my life,

because I sat there looking at the book.

I mean, with tears in my eyes,

I mean, literally with tears in my eyes,

thinking that, "Wow, this is just so amazing,

and that's what I want to do.

I want to make pictures like these.

I want to make pictures that affect other people

the way these pictures are affecting me."

<v ->I don't have a date on this card,</v>

but it's an early collage, just says "beautiful,"

and it has a black figure.

And I remember asking Kerry

did he mean to have that spot there.

But he did.

(all laughing)

And so that's how I began to understand

the many complexities.

<v ->When I was in junior high school,</v>

I got a summer scholarship to take a drawing class

at the Otis Art Institute.

The drawing teacher had a book

that he put on the opaque projector.

It was "Images of Dignity: The 
Drawings of Charles White."

and he showed us those drawings,

and I had never seen anything like it before,

because prior to that, almost all of the artists

I had encountered in art 
history books were European.

I thought, "Wow, this is just amazing."

He says, "Well, you know,

Charles White's got a studio upstairs."

And he said it was okay for 
us to go into the studio

and see some work in progress.

You got to see the process.

You got to see how ugly a drawing can look

before it was brought to this point

of refinement and finish.

That was what was really interesting to me.

I mean, seeing these stages.

And then, yeah, that's...

(both laughing)
Let's see what happens.

<v Student>Are you sure?</v>
Well, you got nothing to lose.

<v Artist>The initial images, 
the underlaying images

all come from photographs of my family in Cuba.

They start at about '38 and 
go right up to the revolution.

<v Kerry>How do you intend now to incorporate</v>

the present moment?

Is that important at all?

<v ->That's a good question.</v>

Probably a dumb thing to say,

but I hadn't really thought 
that all the way through yet.

<v ->That's not a dumb thing to say,</v>

but it's just the kinds of questions

I would be interested in asking

and hearing some reflection on.

Part of what I'm always interested in seeing

when I come to the museum

is not really how refined or 
how finished a work can be,

but I'm really interested in showing,

especially to my students,

evidence of the artists' thinking

and evidence of the artists' process.

Some of what's evident in a painting like this,

an unfinished painting, is that it always,

it reminds me of just how 
difficult making a painting is.

It confirms the suspicion that I always had

that these things don't come 
into existence by magic.

I'm gonna take this out, partly because,

when you're thinking about the 
way to organize the painting,

there's some structural considerations

you have to keep in mind.

This is definitely the kinds 
of images you're working with.

They will actually tell you 
how to make your painting.

This is essentially how I work on my stuff.

I'm always referring to some other source

to give me some clues to how things in my own work

can be organized better.

Well, what I'm doing right now is actually

I'm actually doing a comic strip in newspaper form

that I could use for a particular installation

at the Carnegie.

What I hit on as a subject was this idea

that when you go to the 
museums to see African art,

those symbolic representations

of the heroes seem pretty inert.

The tradition from which they come

doesn't have the same kind of currency

that the tradition of Greek 
mythological heroes has,

although there are parallels 
between those two traditions.

And so I thought what I would do

would be to take those African sculptures

and re-animate them, in a sense,

And make them into the super heroes

to become like a new Luke Skywalker

or a new Darth Vader or a 
new Batman or a new Superman.

Now, when I was growing up reading Marvel comics,

the X-Men, the mighty Hulk, Spider-Man,

all of those characters were 
amazing characters to me.

And so what I'm actually doing

is kind of reverting back 
to my childhood, I guess.

I thought what I would do with this project

was to take a form that's in some ways

already undervalued in America,

take a subject that's under-represented

and try to find a way in which

we can carry these traditions into the future

so that they don't have to just dissipate and die.