Finding an Eden Among the Everyday

Kerry James Marshall recalls his early ‘60s childhood in Watts with uncommon nostalgia. “I have a fondness for that time in L.A., though I only understood the historical context in hindsight,” he says.

Today, he is recognized internationally as an important artist, yet he insists it all began here, where over the course of two decades he grew up and went to college. Speaking by telephone from Chicago, where he has lived since 1989, Marshall recalled his visits to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to study the techniques of various painters.

“My real goal was to see if I could make paintings that would put me in the museum alongside all those artists I admired,” he says. “I recognized that I never saw work there by African American artists who operated on the same scale and at the same level as the others. I’ve made it my business to get work in the museum that operated on that level. That is why it was necessary to study painting. I didn’t want my work to operate purely as a social phenomenon without its position as painting being a critical part of the way it was talked about.”

Marshall returns to L.A. this week with “Mementos,” an exhibition recalling the influence of the civil rights movement, the ‘60s and the evolution of African American culture. Organized by the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, the show includes prints, sculptures and a video projection, along with the types of paintings that established Marshall’s reputation. It opens Friday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

A winner of a grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997, as well as CalArts’ Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the African American artist, now 44, has been hailed for his dedication to the tradition of painting at a time when that medium is largely overshadowed by younger artists’ interest in video, photography and installation art.

His mural-sized, Edenic paintings of L.A. housing projects such as Nickerson Gardens, where he once lived, were featured in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and Documenta X, and they attracted kudos for the quality of their execution and for their unexpected idealism. Critic Helen Molesworth wrote in Total magazine, “Marshall’s paintings . . . are continually shot through with the stuff of everyday life, filled as they are with people just living their lives, and usually, despite all the odds, enjoying themselves.”

Ironically, now that he has achieved critical and some financial success with his paintings, Marshall has made a detour into other media, and only four paintings are among the works in the Santa Monica show. Among them is an introductory painting on Masonite titled “We Mourn Our Loss,” with medallion-style portraits of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with a ghostly image of Malcolm X. That image recurs in “Souvenir I,” which depicts a black middle-class family’s living-room, with a glittering black angel portrayed by the artist’s wife, Cheryl Lynn Bruce. The paintings include the faces or names of African American musicians, artists and writers, as well as those of Black Panthers.

Positioned around the show are 5-foot-tall sculptures of handstamps featuring slogans from the ‘60s, such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Burn Baby Burn,” phrases that are repeated on a series of prints in red, black and green, the colors of black nationalism. His installation of a mausoleum features peepholes on the side, where viewers can see a video projection of a blackface doll laid to rest in a coffin with changing media stereotypes of blacks as criminals or churchgoers. The journal Art in America’s Susan Snodgrass called “Mementos” “a requiem for a tumultuous era and its martyrs; the show reminds us of what was lost and gained during those years and what is yet to be realized now, when the struggle for racial equality has grown diffuse and resistance has resurfaced.”

Marshall explains, “I wanted to represent everything that I thought was really hopeful about the ‘60s, including the contributions of black people culturally and politically that were directed toward more promise. Even their deaths don’t suggest resignation or despair. You can’t think of John Coltrane or Nat King Cole without thinking about how magnificent their contribution was, though their work addressed troubling circumstances. So I think these paintings portray a parallel kind of optimism to what I was portraying in the projects paintings.”

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Although Marshall considers himself first and foremost a painter, he wanted to present the sentiments of that era as they were transmitted in the ‘60s--as agitprop. He didn’t feel that paintings alone would convey his message. “I don’t think painting is a good vehicle for carrying information,” he says. “I try to work from the evocative potential of painting, not simply straight-forwardly. Paintings are as much about being paintings as they are about what they are representing.”

In this case, he wanted to explore special social and political issues, so he decided to work in other media as well. In addition, he was feeling the pressure of having all of his work purchased before the paint was dry; of being labeled in the New York Times as the “flag-bearer for painting.”

“I didn’t want to arrive at a point in my work where people could identify me with a signature style,” Marshall says. “I didn’t want people to look at my work in blocks like that. I thought this show would allow people to really look at each work individually and see how one form of working can’t effectively deal with all the aspects of an issue an artist wants to explore.”

Quick to note that he is not abandoning painting, Marshall says, “That’s why I’m in the art world.” On the other hand, he feels as though he has paid his dues. A professor of art at the University of Illinois, Marshall has single-mindedly attempted to “master the craft” of painting. “I had a mission to acquire what I thought would be a sufficient level of skill in painting to do something I thought might be meaningful and significant. People in the ‘70s were suggesting that painting had outlived its usefulness. I decided not to abandon painting without knowing I could do it well.”

Marshall was 8 when his parents moved to L.A. from Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 and settled the family in Nickerson Gardens. The artist remembers the breezy sense of community there, even during the fires and looting of the Watts Riots three years after they arrived. Always interested in becoming an artist, he watched John Gnagy’s instructional learn-to-draw program on television, bought his packaged drawing kit from the drugstore and began to do the exercises.

In the fifth grade, Marshall wrote a book report on an anthology titled “Great Negros: Past and Present,” which features African American artist Charles White. Two years later, the aspiring artist traveled by bus to Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) during the summer to take a drawing class and was stunned to discover that White had a studio on campus and that he invited students to visit. “I didn’t even know he was alive. I guess I thought all famous artists were dead. Plus, it was the first time I had ever seen unfinished work, which was significant, because I had been trying to find out the secrets of the artists I admired.”

Encouraged by White and others, he determined to attend college at Otis, but when he enrolled in 1977, the focus of the school’s curriculum had changed dramatically, and there was little support for the painting department and the skills Marshall craved. He recalls that during the two years he attended, he learned about color from Sam Clayberger and composition and painting analysis from Arnold Mesches. Otherwise, the curriculum was hostile toward artists who wanted to paint, emphasizing instead video, performance or installation art. After attaining his bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1978, he rejected graduate school. (This year, Otis awarded Marshall an honorary doctorate.) He rented a studio and set about solving a series of problems in painting, reading books on art and art history, and regularly visiting the L.A. County Museum of Art.

During the ‘80s, Marshall gained some recognition for his small paintings and collages that were indebted to the influence of artist Betye Saar, among others. Writing a critique of his work, The Times’ art writer Suzanne Muchnic observed that the colors and composition were competent, but in the end, the collages resembled the work of any number of other artists. “That was really a jolt to me,” says Marshall. “But it woke me up and got me to start thinking about the kinds of paintings I make today.”

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Marshall moved to New York in 1985 with a fellowship from the Studio Museum in Harlem. Having been to the city only once before, he dedicated himself to visiting museums and studying paintings. He did not contact any dealers, feeling that he was not yet ready. He met Bruce, the actress whom he later married, and in 1989 moved with her to her hometown of Chicago, where she wanted to raise her daughter. Without a studio and working part-time jobs, Marshall’s career stalled for a few years. When he moved into a studio, however, his paintings emerged on a new scale and in a more realized fashion than before.

“I was working on a completely new level,” he recalls. He showed them at the Koplin Gallery in 1993, and his painting “De Style,” of a group of blacks in a barber shop with elaborate hair styles, was acquired by LACMA, fulfilling his earlier dream.

Although “Mementos” has toured five other venues, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art the resonance with Marshall’s personal history will be profound. The occasion serves as an overdue homage to the influential White who, Marshall says, “led me to history as an important and motivating factor.”

Plus, Marshall muses, “In the ‘60s, the dilemma was that a lot of the work was long on protest and short on aesthetics. I tried to find a more delicate balance.”

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“MEMENTOS,” by Kerry James Marshall, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, Building G1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Dates: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Prices: Suggested admission, $3; students and seniors, $2. Phone: (310) 586-6488.