Kerry James Marshall | Untitled (Studio) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2024)

FAQs

What is Kerry James Marshall's painting Better Homes Better Gardens What is he attempting to communicate? ›

Better Homes, Better Gardens is part of a series of paintings that Marshall calls the “Garden Project.” The paintings in this series portray scenes that suggest the complexity of life in low-income housing projects. They are rich in references to art history, social history, and Marshall's own personal history.

Many Mansions is based on a Chicago housing project called Stateway Gardens that was demolished in 2001. Many Mansions is part of a larger series of paintings called Garden Project, created by Kerry James Marshall to explore the irony of referring to housing projects as “gardens.”

In his studio in Chicago, Marshall discusses his career, his strategies to circumvent institutional inequality, and his mission to diversify the cultural representations that are prioritized and historicized by the museum and art history canon.

Over the years, Marshall has worked primarily in acrylic paint, and starting around 2003 he developed a new physical support for his paintings: sheets of Plexiglas or PVC, mounted and framed with clean white-plastic molding.

In May 2017, the painting was auctioned at Sotheby's to Japanese businessman and art collector Yusaku Maezawa for $110.5 million, which far exceeded the pre-sale estimate of $60 million. Basquiat, who was 21-years-old when he painted Untitled, is the youngest artist to eclipse the $100 million mark.

Kerry James Marshall's work often explores themes of racial identity, community, and belonging. Our Town is part of his Garden Project series, in which low-income housing projects are ironically rendered as idyllic places.

More pointedly, “My Father's house” is, elsewhere in the Gospels, a direct reference to the Temple. The Father's “house” is not in the first instance some dwelling place in the eschatological distance, but a place where even now we can seek fellowship with God. And this place will be better than the Temple.

The painting “Building More Stately Mansions” celebrates modern black workers—from laborers to scientists—as the inheritors of a legacy handed down from ancestors who built the pyramids of Egypt. Several other works here show black figures toiling in fields or at other manual jobs.

Marshall is best known for his richly worked large acrylic paintings on unstretched canvas that investigate many aspects of modern African American vernacular existence.

Explanation: Kerry James Marshall was interested in the past because he wanted to offset the mainstream canon of art history's omission of Black experience. In his painting Past Times, Marshall aimed to depict and honor the African American experience, which had been largely ignored in traditional art history.

Who was James Marshall's boss? ›

Wyatt Logan at first thinks Marshall might be the sleeper agent in 1848, but Lucy Preston knows his true identity. The appearance of his boss, John Sutter, leads Lucy to think that history has been relatively unaltered in 1848.

At the heart of Judith Scott's sculptures are found objects from the everyday world, nestled and enshrouded within colored fibers—yarn, string, ribbon—which are not simply woven or wrapped to form the object's exterior, but are intricately webbed and bound in what became the artist's signature style.

miniature painting, small, finely wrought portrait executed on vellum, prepared card, copper, or ivory. The name is derived from the minium, or red lead, used by the medieval illuminators.

Audrey Flack, “Wheel of Fortune (Vanitas)” (1977-1978). Oil over acrylic on canvas. 96 x 96 inches.

This picture is painted on canvas, but he later painted onto wooden boards. He would use a razor blade to scrape back the paint so that the pictures look weather beaten and old, as if they have been eroded by time. Ben Nicholson was born in England in 1894.