Yes, sorry, sorry. [LAUGHTER] And then-- and we were really glad it was there. [LAUGHTER] And this year, Time magazine included Kerry James Marshall in its listings as one of the 100 most influential people and described his work as follows. Black is his dominant color and his persistent, consistent, and masterful use of it in all its palettes defines, engages, and draws countless viewers to each creation.
He forces people to assess the American experience through the black experience. In so doing, he has established himself, not only among the giants of the black art milieu, but as one of the most influential American artists anywhere. Personally, I'm struck by the enormity of the ambition in Marshall's work, as it details the personal experience of the painter, the particularity of the African-American experience in the context of both local and national communities, while at the same time, through masterful use of paint, composition, and reference to wide swaths of art history, the door is left open to the possibility that painting might be able to speak past the origins of the author. At this moment in which the globe seems to be getting smaller and smaller, Marshall's work insists that wants on its regional particularity and on keeping the lines of communication open between us all. Marshall has a stated mission to populate museums and galleries with representations of people of color throughout the United States and around the world. It seems that he is having much success on that front. And I for one am rooting for him and for all of us, hopeful that we can pull up many chairs to the global table. So I welcome Kerry James Marshall. [APPLAUSE] KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: Well, thank you so much, so much, for such a warm welcome. Everybody came out and made their presentations, and then they went behind stage and left me out here by myself. So well, we got it to spend about an hour or so going over a couple of things. And then Jackie Stewart and I are going to sit up on this stage. And we're going to have a few questions from the audience that she's going to moderate. But I'm going to sit there, I'm going to let Jackie do all the work [LAUGHING] because I'm a little tired. This has been a long day today. I think Jessica mentioned in her opening remarks that I'd just come back from the Art Institute of Chicago's commencement, graduating commencement, where I was given an honorary doctorate degree this afternoon. And I had to make the commencement speech there. [APPLAUSE] So you can get a little talked out after a marathon weekend like the weekend I just had. And so with a little bit of energy I got left, I have some prepared remarks I'm going to read to you. And then I got a lot of pictures to show. And the pictures that I show are designed in some way to kind of set the stage and give a kind of context to the things that drives me, that motivate me, that lead me to do the things I do, and how those things in some way have kind of led me to be here on this stage as the recipient of the Rosenberger Medal to give this presentation. And so that first slide that's on the screen now, I mean, really is the framework in which I operate. It's the context in which almost all the things I do have to be or should be measured against, because my ambition as an artist had always been, in one way or another, to either be a part of the narrative that these kinds of histories represent, but to arrive at the place that these histories codify on terms that I set for myself and to get there without having to compromise my own desire and what I think my own objectives, which are not inconsistent with the objectives that are defined by these histories that we come to know and understand as the primary histories that define the parameters of the world of art that we, who are participating in it, want to be a part of. So I'm going to leave that up there for a while. And when I get to the slides, though, you have to bear with me because I have a lot of them.
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AuthorEva Dunlopd Archives
March 2019
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