October 22, 2016 - 18:00
Please read this powerful story about the artist Kerry James Marshall painting black figures into the canon:
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/kerry-james-marshall-artist.html
"That the image of the black figure has needed to evolve through time is a bald fact of American political life, but what makes Marshall’s work as a painter unprecedented...is how he’s been engaging with that evolution as an aesthetic project....there’s no meaningful history of black figures in the Western painting tradition....Marshall told me, “you can talk about it as an exclusion, in which case there’s a kind of indictment of history for failing to be responsible for something it should have been. I don’t have that kind of mission. I don’t have that indictment. My interest in being a part of it is being an expansion of it, not a critique of it.....one of the things you have to do is, at the moment you have to find yourself down, you have to start thinking strategically about how to get yourself into a position where you’re not that vulnerable. This is precisely how I see the world.”