"Marshall grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, just a few blocks away from where the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a white supremacist attack that killed four young black girls, took place in 1963. When his family moved to Los Angeles, they ended up right in the middle of the 1965 Watts riots, a six-day uprising fuelled by growing racial tension in the poorest part of the city."
"Today, seated in the galleries of the Royal Academy in London, where his jaw-dropping, large-scale, colourful paintings are going on display for a major show, he reels off a list of traumatic, shocking events from his youth. Beatings, murders, injuries, robberies, and that's not even half of it, he says with a smile, chuckling. I came this way against the odds, given the time that I entered art school"
Kerry James Marshall grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, near the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and later lived through the 1965 Watts riots after his family moved to Los Angeles. Beatings, murders, injuries and robberies marked his youth and informed a lifelong engagement with racial history from slavery to civil rights. He defied dominant art trends such as conceptualism and abstraction, choosing a classical, figurative approach. He makes large-scale, colorful paintings that assert Black presence and personal ambition. A major show at the Royal Academy in London presents these jaw-dropping works and traces the influence of trauma, resilience and self-determined artistic goals.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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