Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois. A retrospective exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2016. Early life and education Marshall was born October 17, 1955, in Birmingham, Alabama. He was raised in Birmingham and later in Los Angeles, California. He is the son of a postal worker and a homemaker. His father's hobby was buying broken watches that he would pick up in pawn shops for a song, figure out how to fix them with the help of books he would find, before reselling the watches. Marshall was able to learn to deconstruct items that he saw as rarefied and complex, making them his own. His home in Los Angeles was near the Black Panther Party's headquarters, which left him with a feeling of social responsibility and influenced his work directly.