Kerry James Marshall at the Museum of Contemporary Art

In "One True Thing: Meditations of Black Aesthetics," Kerry James Marshall's first major exhibition since 1998, the artist reclaimed the notion of a black esthetic, an artistic and political strategy born out of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and '70s. Marshall invested his diverse works--including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture and installation--with visual motifs and narratives derived from contemporary black experience and its African legacy.

In lieu of the standard mid-career survey, Marshall opted for something more improvisational, as suggested by the photographic installation The Art of Hanging Pictures (2002), in which a portrait of an unidentified African-American woman and several urban scenes were hung in a freeform arrangement. Marshall also invited three other artists--Senga Nengudi, Damon Lamar Reed and L. Eduardoto--to exhibit alongside him.

The show operated somewhere between Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel whose black protagonist is burdened by the white world's inability to see beyond the color of his skin, and a purely essentialist viewpoint. Black Painting (2003) and the photograph Black Artist (Studio View), 2002, illustrate the plight of Ellison's character: in both works, private spaces inhabited by African-American figures (a self-portrait in the latter case) are veiled in darkness so that viewers are aware of the subjects' blackness and the obscurity surrounding them. More to the point, Marshall makes visible the uniqueness and diversity of black expression, contesting, whether consciously or unconsciously, the concept of "post-black," a term coined by curator Thelma Golden in the exhibition "Freestyle" (2001) at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which gathered works by contemporary black artists declared "stylistically free" of identity politics. Marshall's meditations here encompassed many styles and mediums, while centering on themes of community, sociopolitical awareness, the African diaspora and black culture.

The exhibition focused on works made within the last two years, including Momento #5 (2003), the last in his series of monumental paintings that pay homage to the civil rights movement [see A.i.A., Nov. '98]. Several works subvert iconic moments in Western art history by interjecting a black presence or iconography, such as The Ladder of Success (2003), a Judd-like stack of modular Plexiglas boxes onto which are engraved the principles of Kwanzaa. An accompanying photograph depicted the "Ebony-Jet" sign towering over Chicago's nighttime skyline. Two related works titled Garden Party (both 2003)--one a painting, the other a DVD projection--are multiracial versions of the Impressionist fete galante.

Marshall cast his net wide for this show and mostly succeeded, although there was some unevenness of craft, as well as a few moments of organizational incoherence. Highlights were his paintings, particularly 7 am Sunday Morning (2003), a quiet street scene dappled with geometric shards of light, and SOB, SOB (2003), in which a young black woman, surrounded by books related to black history, seems to mourn a precolonial Africa. The true achievement of "One True Thing" was its challenge to mainstream definitions of black identity and traditional curatorial practices. In the end, the Black esthetic is not a prescriptive, but a means by which to reframe the art-historical canon.

[At the Baltimore Museum June 20 -Sept. 5, then the Studio Museum in Harlem, Oct. 13, 2004-Jan 9, 2005.]--Susan Snodgrass

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