Kerry James Marshall
PainterKnown for:
large-scale figurative painting of Black American life
Education:
Otis College of Art and Design (BFA, 1978)
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.
Kerry James Marshall's Gear List(1)
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Primary painting medium is acrylic paint — uses jars of acrylic. Built an entire technique around flat fields of bright color and figurative form on unstretched canvas. Uses three shades of black (carbon, mars, ivory). Specific acrylic brand not publicly documented.
Product description
Acrylic paint — pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion — dries quickly to a water-resistant finish and can be thinned with water or medium. Introduced commercially in the 1950s, it became the dominant alternative to oil paint for contemporary painters working in flat color, mixed media, and large-scale formats.
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Last updated March 20, 2026