Kerry James Marshall Exhibit

I needed a day away; a distraction from my own life. My friend Stacy told me about the Kerry James Marshall Mastry exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  I realized this would take me out of my own personal thoughts and open my mind to something new. I have never been to the MCA before and Kerry James Marshall was a new artist to me. If you click on the link to the museum above, you will get more information about Marshall and this exhibit. 

I took the train into the City and then on the recommendation of the train Carmen I took the water taxi from Ogilvie Station down to Michigan Avenue. For $8 during the week and $10 on the weekend, you can have unlimited rides on the up and down the river. 

If you haven't spent much time on the Chicago River recently, you will be amazed at the changes. There are now many outdoor "rooms" with restaurants, bars and lots of places to sit and watch the people go by.

Walking to the museum, the rain had stopped, but the puddles were still reflecting the world as it went by.

The museum is pretty nondescript from the outside and as usual, most of the people hanging out were focused on their phones rather than the world around them. The entry fee is a suggested donation of $12. (It is free to the public on Tuesday's.) I happily paid the suggested donation as I love to support the arts in any way that I can.

Inside, even the stairways are artistic. 

Before you reach Marshall's exhibit on the top floor, (take the stairs if you are able or stop at each floor if you need to take the elevator) there is another exhibit by Andrew Yang called Matter Matters. The photograph above is a capture of part of a larger piece. It spoke to me that it was meant to be here in this museum at the same time as Marshall's exhibit (Well played MCA). In a video at the beginning of the Mastry exhibit, Kerry James Marshall talks about how he needed to find his way in the art world that historically was a predominantly white field. He talks about how Art education is systematized and teaches a prescribed way of doing things. He discussies his "Paint by Numbers works and shows that the painter in the painting is "Taking liberties with the outlined and defined image, even of ones self."  Part of his goal is to normalize seeing black content figures in the museums and on display. He makes much more sense in his video than I am. Click the link below to watch it. This exhibit is a retrospective, it is not just about one thing it shows how his ideas and ideals have changed over his artistic life. 

https://mcachicago.org/Stories/Video/Kerry-James-Marshall-Mastry

School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012

Detail from the Barber Shop painting Growing Up in Watts, LA

This is one room of the exhibit. You can see that the work is large, vibrant and full of life. What stood out to me as I walked through the exhibit was that most of the visitors were white. I was excited to learn from my friend that through a grant, there was a group a young African American students who were brought to see the exhibit on a field trip. This pleased me immensely as I believe it is a big part of the purpose of Marshall's work to show children of color that they too can be successful artists if they choose that path and that black people do appear in artwork. This exhibit shows that you can be anything that you want to be if you have the desire to become it and you make the effort and energy to make it happen.

When I took a job at the Chicago Public Library several years ago, my first branch was the Roosevelt Branch which was surrounded by University of Illinois Chicago campus and a low-income high-rise. As the Children's Librarian, I worked with the kids who came in to get out of the summer heat or just to have a place to go. Most of those kids were black and came on their own. Many of them were just in their first years of school. The summer reading theme was about art from the Art Institute. We offered programs for kids to create their own artwork and explore the world of art. What really sticks out to me wasn't the art or the activities, but the young girls asking me if they could touch my hair. It was red and so different from theirs. Today that is such a no no, but when it happened, all I could think was that they need to understand the world around them and if they are going to make any connection with me they need to see the ways that we are different and the same. I wish now, that I would have been to be able to take them to see Marshall's exhibit and then to talk with them about what they saw and how they felt about the experience. We could have talked about the ways that we are the same and different, we could have broken out of the systematized way that we are supposed to understand the world and taken liberties with the way we define ourselves.

The exhibit is only in Chicago through this weekend and then it will be moving to New York so if you have a couple of hours in Chicago this week, I recommend you stop in to see this great exhibit and if at all possible share it with someone who might not otherwise be able to go.

Here is another great article about his work.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-kerry-james-marshall-became-a-superhero-for-chicago-s-housing-projects

Looking down from the top of the staircase at MCA.