Kerry James Marshall is famed for his beautifully executed paintings that address the under-representation of the Black figure in the Western pictorial tradition. Though best known as a painter, Marshall has throughout his career also produced a vast graphic oeuvre that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. Marshall spent his youth building his craft in drawing and painting, but also in wood engraving and printing; by his mid-twenties, he recalls, "I could do woodcuts, etchings, aquatints." Most of his prints have been produced not in professional print workshops but by the artist, working alone in his studio. They range from images the size of postcards to his 50-foot-long, 12-panel woodcut Untitled (1998-99), to iterations of his ongoing magnum opus Rythm Mastr. And while some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist's archive and are unknown to the public. This catalogue raisonné offers the first public account of these important works and the first in-depth study of the role of printed images and print processes in Marshall's work as a whole.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, later moving to Los Angeles. He taught painting for many years at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is currently working with Marshall to create two new stained-glass windows. Marshall lives and works in Chicago.
Massachusetts- and Berlin-based art historian Susan Tallman has written extensively on contemporary art, the history of prints and aspects of authenticity.