Kerry James Marshall, Painters Series, 2008-10
In this collection of portraits, Kerry James Marshall brings together the language of abstraction with an unapologetically raced and gendered presence to reimagine the mythic image of the painter.
The compositions are divided into three interrelated but visually distinct passages - the palette, the painter and their studio. Each oversized palette the artists hold exist as abstract paintings in their own right. The painter, grand in their majesty, stand behind the palettes as a type of representational image. Behind the painters we find self-portraits in process, represented by the popular paint-by-numbers technique.
A lack of black bodies represented in popular figurative painting propelled African American artists to embrace abstraction as a tool to emancipate them from having to make work about their identity and the racial readings that followed. Marshall’s artists are depicted weilding both abstraction and figuration to paint themselves into being.