Better Homes, Better Gardens (1994). Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas, 100×142 in.
Marshall’s large-scale, colorful paintings of dignified, hyper-black figures depicted in commonplace settings—a barber shop, a backyard party, or the housing projects in Chicago’s South Side, where he has lived and worked in the Bronzeville neighborhood since 1987—place ordinary figures in the world, too. And that generosity extends to Marshall’s persona in the real world. “He’s the kind of person that will engage with someone no matter who you are in the world,” says the artist and art historian Raél Salley of his close friend Marshall. “And that kind of openness requires a certain disposition—a certain kind of orientation to the universe—that this is a friendly universe.”
Yet to characterize Marshall as a poster child for African-American art is a disservice to the project of someone who has plumbed the depths of blackness and beauty, a long-neglected artistic subject, using the tools of Old Master painting, for nearly 40 years. “You don’t have much of a history of black people trying to represent themselves as an ideal, or representing themselves with a kind of ordinary grace,” he says, “where a person isn’t standing in for some sort of political symbol, but is simply elegant because they’re there. And still it’s a beautiful picture and that’s all it is.”
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