Kerry James Marshall, Light, and Invisibility

Kerry James Marshall (American, b. 1955) is known for pushing the boundaries of the art historical tradition in his innovations with medium and style, and through his depiction of marginalized bodies— scenes historically ignored in artistic cannon, especially those of his own black community. A work acquired directly from the artist, Curtained Window (2005) is a unique example of Marshall’s creative themes. Through his composition and the use of glitter, Marshall emphasizes experimentation with light and optics to reinforce the idea of invisibility faced by black communities, as also highlighted in fiction by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic Invisible Man—an important influence to Marshall— and in scholarship by art historians like Krista Thompson.

 The small, devotional-sized scene opens into an outdoor urban landscape—a solitary tree in the center of the composition in front of softly defined pastel houses and apartments in the background illustrated with loose brushstrokes. Amid the blocks of color and organic borders characterizing the rest of the landscape. a brutalist apartment block cuts into the right, with ink applied over the wash emphasizing the starkness of its regular architectural forms. The entire scene, as through a window, is framed by flowing gold curtains of glitter. It is the performative use of this glitter that creates tension with extending landscape, ultimately drawing attention away from this exterior environment. This deemphasis extends to metaphors of the black community’s visibility as a whole in this depopulated stage.

Marshall has used gold glitter in his work throughout his career, such as in Souvenir I (1997, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), where glitter is used both as gilded embellishment on elements within the interior scene—such as the central figure’s wings—as well as to provide framing. He also used glitter in the painting Gulf Stream (2003, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis), with a shimmering frame bordering the entire scene, utilizing a woven pattern not unlike that in Curtained Window.

Curtained Window is interesting in its complete lack of people, with the greatest emphasis on the framing device of glittering curtain. The three-dimensional gilding provides an entry into the two-dimensional scene beyond, while also undermining that scene through its distracting opulence and artificiality. The glitter serves as a tool described by scholar Krista Thompson in her research in the use of light and optics in the art of African diasporic communities as part of a “visual economy of light.” Describing how objects in these urban communities gain value not necessarily for monetary or commercial reasons but rather if they enhance the user through aesthetics where “[t]hings that bling, shine, or shimmer, that emit light, are especially privileged.”[i]

Here, Marshall does this exactly, animating his scene through the applied prestige of his gilding, opening dramatically like theatrical stage curtains onto this otherwise quotidian landscape. The materiality of the glitter itself is of less importance, with more emphasis on the light it reflects—falling into Thompson’s analysis: “a product of everyday aspirational practices of black urban communities, who make do and more with what they have, creating prestige through the resources at hand. But these very processes can have a critical valence because they have the potential to disrupt notions of value by privileging not things but their visual effects”.[ii]

Thus, the value of Marshall’s study is shifted away from the ‘typical’ expectation for an artwork with a view out a window—that which is occurring outside—and is instead shifted to the trappings of the framing of this scene itself. This theme is emphasized through the manner of depiction of the painted landscape view. The overall haziness of the work makes it unclear what season is being depicted, as the leaves on the tree are delineated only by gray swipes of the brush. Buildings in the background are defined by blotchy color fields, with only the contoured brutalist building hinting at a threat of a starker reality.

This tension between the dichotomy of glistening three-dimensional curtains and the dimmer landscape emphasizes an interesting byproduct of the applied visual economy of light—where the use of light to draw attention and define personhood becomes so blinding that it has the opposite intended effect, shifting the subject from hypervisibility to a “un-visibility.” Thompson, using Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man to connect ideas of visibility to socio-political representation of black diasporic communities throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first- centuries, notes that this blinding use of light can have a performative aspect in which it is “tacitly producing the state of being unseen, or making the un-visible’s disappearance seen.” [iii]

Kerry James Marshall has likewise discussed this contrast between visibility and invisibility in Invisible Man that has so influenced his practice, noting that “The kind of simultaneity that Ralph Ellison was talking about is the simultaneous presence and absence, is being there and not being there at the same time. In order to get at this notion of invisibility, I started to develop a strategy for making that as a representation”.[iv] Marshall’s contemplation of these themes in the small study of Curtained Window is clear and illuminating. As a local view of the community is depopulated, defined with bright colors but only just, the viewer’s focus becomes wholly distracted with the glittering three-dimensional curtain meant to lead into the landscape. The curtains thus take on a measure of pride and prestige through their gilding, but in this glittery topcoat, also purposefully undermine anything else in the landscape that the viewer is meant to see.

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[i] Krista Thompson, “Introduction: Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels,” in The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 24.

[ii] Ibid., 25.

[iii] Ibid., 40.

[iv] Kerry James Marshall, “Inside Out: A Lecture by Kerry James Marshall” in Kerry James Marshall: Inside/Out, ed. Carla Cugini (Cologne: Walther König, 2018), 19-20.

Bibliography:

Marshall, Kerry James. “Inside Out: A Lecture by Kerry James Marshall.” In Kerry James Marshall: Inside/Out, 10-71. Edited by Carla Cugini. Cologne: Walther König, 2018.

Thompson, Krista. “Introduction: Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels.” In The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, 1-46. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.