Coloring Perception

Kerry James Marshall Thinks the Old Masters Have Room for a New Face: His Own

CHICAGO

Can an artist get much more successful than Kerry James Marshall? Museums everywhere own his work. (The Corcoran was one of his first buyers. And the Baltimore Museum of Art is displaying his "Ladder of Success," a recent purchase.) In 1997, he won the $500,000 MacArthur "genius" award, an ultra-prestigious invitation to Germany's twice-a-decade Documenta show and a place in the Whitney Museum's biennial.

In 2003, a big solo show of Marshall's work toured the country to rave reviews. That same year, he was in the Venice Biennale. By 2007, Marshall had received an unheard-of second invitation to Documenta, where his ghetto-themed conceptual comics may have been the best thing in the 113-artist show. (To showcase his work, The Post offered Marshall a two-page spread in the paper to fill with an original piece. He came up with the unique Washington installment of his comic art that's on view in the middle of this section.)

Success, after success, after success, such as few black artists have ever had. And not nearly good enough. Marshall says that he has yet to measure up to certain of his best-known rivals: "Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. . . . They represent the core of the historical pantheon of great artists, recognized worldwide. And a big part of my objective is to be listed in the history among those artists."

It's about "a longing to be fully a part of the story of some system you are deeply in love with," says Marshall, no doubt echoing the feelings of a certain other black Chicagoan who has made it big lately. And it's about the certain knowledge that, in art at least, no black person has ever truly reached that goal.

Until quite recently, black people have barely even been the subjects of pictures.

Marshall has set out to correct that imbalance. Some of his pictures portray the living rooms of the black middle class. There are also paintings of street toughs, dead before their time. Marshall has painted inner-city housing projects and black lovers by the sea. He's also worked a bit in installation art, photography, video and even puppetry. But whatever the subject, or the medium, his works balance celebration and critique of black America; it's impossible to come to any simple reading of his pictures' point of view. Marshall may be today's most eloquent artistic chronicler, and most compelling analyst, of the African American experience. His success beyond the black community means that he's also opened mainstream eyes to it.

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In his chaotic studio in a run-down neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Marshall talks about his own experience as a black American, and as a black artist. He's dressed in khakis and a jean shirt, with reading glasses on a string and his salt-and-pepper hair and beard cropped short. He could pass for a senior academic outfitted for Saturday yardwork. Which isn't that far from the truth: He moved to Chicago in 1987 to work at the University of Illinois, and only stopped teaching earlier this decade. (He also has a large yard behind his tidy house nearby, but the compulsive gardening is done by his wife, the actress and director Cheryl Lynn Bruce. Their answering machine gives a constant update on the state of her flowers.)

Marshall was born in 1955, into a working-class family in Birmingham, Ala. When he was 7 his father got a job in the kitchens of a VA hospital in Los Angeles, moving the family to the rough streets of Watts and then to south-central L.A.

Home -- the whole neighborhood -- was art-free, so Marshall launched his career at the local library: "You learn you can take books out. . . . I just started walking up and down the stacks." By the third and fourth grades he knew "every single art book in the library."