Kerry James Marshall

b. 1955

American artist and professor Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his BFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1978, where he was later awarded an honorary doctorate in 1999. He currently lives and works in Chicago.

Marshall is renowned for his large-scale, vivid works that place Black figures at the center of Western art traditions from which they were long excluded. Drawing on references from art history, civil rights, comics, science fiction, and personal memory, his paintings both confront historical absence and celebrate Black life, while imagining more hopeful futures.

Marshall’s works are housed in museum collections across the globe, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.