Kerry James Marshall

This Phaidon Contemporary Artists volume is the most comprehensive book on Kerry James Marshall published to date. It covers an Alabama-born, Chicago-based painter known for placing Black figures, painted in tones of near-black, at the center of a Western art-historical tradition that had largely excluded them.

The series format pairs a career survey with an interview and short essays. Charles Gaines and Greg Tate discuss Marshall's work and its place in the history of African-American representation, and Laurence Rassel contributes further critical writing. Marshall moves between abstraction, realism, and comics, drawing on all three; the book tracks how he folds those traditions into paintings aimed at countering stereotyped depictions of Black people in American art and media.

Marshall studied at Otis Art Institute under Charles White. He has spent most of his career in Chicago, where his 1990s "Garden Project" paintings and his later history paintings established him as one of the defining American painters of his generation. This 2017 edition remains the standard general-reader introduction to his work, distinct from the larger Mastry retrospective catalogue.