Through its formal acuity, Kerry James Marshall's (b. 1955) work
reveals and questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and
power. As the artist has written, 'I gave up on the idea of making
Art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make
paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question
of what Art is returned as a critical issue.' Engaged in an ongoing
dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Marshall
has deftly reinterpreted and updated its tropes, compositions, and
styles, even pulling talismans from the canvases of his forbearers
and recontextualizing them within a modern setting. At the center
of his prodigious oeuvre, which also includes drawings and
sculpture, is the critical recognition of the conditions of
invisibility so long ascribed to black bodies in the Western
pictorial tradition, and the creation of what he calls a
'counter-archive' that reinscribes these figures within its
narrative arc.
Teju Cole is an essayist, photographer, curator, and the author of
Open City (2011) and Blind Spot (2017), among other books. His
honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler
Literaturpreis, the Windham Campbell Prize, the Rosenthal Award
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim
Fellowship. His photography has been the subject of solo
exhibitions in Milan, Berlin, Zürich, and New York, and he has
given several distinguished lectureships. Originally trained as an
art historian, he has written the "On Photography" column for The
New York Times Magazine since 2015. Born in the US and raised in
Nigeria, Cole is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice
of Creative Writing at Harvard University.
Hal Foster (b. 1955) has been a force in American art criticism
since the late seventies, bringing psychoanalytic and
poststructural theory to bear on contemporary art and its
historical precedents. In 1983 he edited the anthology The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which helped frame
postmodernism within the arts. Foster began to write for Artforum
in 1978 and was a senior editor at Art in America (1981-1987)
before becoming a coeditor of the journal October in 1991, and
contributes frequently to Artforum, October, and the London Review
of Books. His books include Recodings (1985); Compulsive Beauty
(1993); The Return of the Real (1996); Design and Crime (2002); The
Art-Architecture Complex (2011); The First Pop Age (2012); and Bad
New Days (2015). He is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917,
Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.
"Diddy and Ye's favourite artist is back with a gorgeous but
vitriolic attack on the representations of black bodies and black
artists in the history of art. Brilliant."--Eddy Frankel "TimeOut
London"
"Kerry James Marshall is one of the most prolific painters
currently living, and if you're unable to see his works in person,
this book is the next best thing."--Lee Cutlip "Inside Hook"
"Marshall addresses the history and function of applying paint,
pigment, and color to a solid surface through still life,
landscape, abstraction, and portraiture, his most acclaimed genre,
and one which continuously questions our understanding of beauty,
taste, and power."--Rianna Jade Parker "ARTnews"
"Marshall is commenting not only on art history but on the
contemporary market: the way works accrue meaning and ultimately
value... And it's some of the best contemporary art on show.
Marshall continues to shake things up - quietly, and from the
inside."--Griselda Murray Brown "Financial Times"
"The hugely influential American artist examines how the medium of
painting has engaged with race and gender for six centuries...
Marshall's paintings are astutely elucidated in two texts specially
commissioned for this book."-- "Nataal"
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