INSPIRATION
Why is this is this inspiring? Kerry James Marshall. This is his work.
BLACK FACED MINSTRELSY
The very first minstrel show probably occurred in 1843, in New York City. Within a year it became the most popular form of live entertainment in America, and it remained so from the time Tom Sawyer was a child up to the time MT began writing Huck Finn. It's known that MT loved the form -- in an autobiographical reminiscence dictated in 1906 he said, using a word that would have bothered almost no white Americans at the time but which now makes us wince, that "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show" was "the show which to me had no peer" and "a thoroughly delightful thing." Just as his use of that word in Huck Finn has provoked controversy, so do commentators disagree on how to characterize the minstrel show as a source for the novel.
In the minstrel show white entertainers put on blackface and "imitated" or "caricatured" slaves in the South and ex-slaves in the North. The distinction is crucial. During MT's times most white commentary on minstrelsy (including MT's own remarks for his autobiography) assume its accuracy, its essentially faithful imitation of African-American speech, singing and dancing. Since the Civil Rights Movement, on the other hand, nearly every commentator agrees that the minstrel show "coon" is a racist caricature.The group pictured below, Harmoneons Carolina Minstrels, is atypical in its inclusion of a woman, but this picture, from the cover of a piece of sheet music published in 1845, is the earliest illustration of minstrelsy in the Barrett Collection.
How white audience would have been with the stereotypes of minstrelsy is indicated by the many notices and ads for minstrel performances that I found while looking for reviews of MT's early lectures in newspapers from Peoria or Newark. It's also clear to me that Cort, the white New York teenager Edward Kemble used as his model for the figures in his illustrations for Huck Finn, imagined African-Americans after the model of Bones and Tambo. Kemble says Cort most enjoyed posing as Jim: "he would jam his little black wool cap over his head, shoot out his lips and mumble coon talk." And when I look at Kemble's representations of Jim, I don't see a human being, but this same caricature.
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and an honorary doctorate in 1999. The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from African-American popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall. In his “Souvenir” series of paintings and sculptures, he pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era—Black Power!—and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary African-American citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s. In “RYTHM MASTR,” Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite that risks losing touch with traditional culture. Marshall’s work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles White. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall believes “you still have to earn your audience’s attention every time you make something.” The sheer beauty of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously formally rigorous and socially engaged. Marshall lives in Chicago.
