Kerry James Marshall Mastry

Mastry is the catalogue for the first full career retrospective of Kerry James Marshall. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago organized the show. It opened there April 23 to September 25, 2016, then traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (October 25, 2016-January 29, 2017) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 12-July 2, 2017).

Helen Molesworth edited the book. It gathers essays by Ian Alteveer, Dieter Roelstraete, and Laura Tattersall, alongside plates spanning Marshall's history paintings, genre scenes, and portraits. Four decades of work are covered here, all of it putting Black figures at the center of a painting tradition built largely without them. The title, a compression of "mastery," points to the show's central argument: that Marshall belongs in direct conversation with the European and American painters he studied and revised.

Marshall trained at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles under the painter Charles White, an influence that carried through his college years and into the history paintings that made his reputation. At 280 pages, this Skira Rizzoli catalogue is the fuller of the two references on his work in the collection, next to the earlier Phaidon Contemporary Artists monograph.