Kerry James Marshall

Known for: large-scale figurative painting of Black American life

Kerry James Marshall has spent four decades painting large-scale figurative works in which Black figures are painted in the deepest possible tones of black skin pigment, insisting on full chromatic representation of subjects that art history has consistently rendered marginal or invisible. His Past Times (1997) sold for $21.1 million at Sotheby's in 2018, then the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living Black artist. He grew up in Watts, Los Angeles, near the site of the 1965 uprising.