Kerry James Marshall uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, and photography to comment on the history of Black identity both in the United States and in Western art. He is well known for paintings that focus on Black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, and has explored issues of race and history through imagery ranging from abstraction to comics.

He was in Birmingham in 1963, when white supremacists dynamited a Baptist church and killed four young girls. He was 9 and living in Los Angeles in 1965 when Watts went up in flames. He remembers all that, just as he also remembers growing up in those years in a loving family: mother, father, sister, brother. Home.

Marshall said in a 2012 interview with Art + Auction that “it is possible to transcend what is perceived to be the limitations of a race-conscious kind of work. It is a limitation only if you accept someone else’s foreclosure from the outside. If you plumb the depths yourself, you can exercise a good deal of creative flexibility. You are limited only by your ability to imagine possibilities.”

In 2018 a Kerry James Marshall Painting Sells for $21.1 Million, the Highest Price at Auction for a Work by a Living African American Artist