Kerry James Marshall: Untitled (Woman Looking Left), 2016

Kerry James Marshall:
Untitled (Woman Looking Left), 2016

The work of the celebrated American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) reveals and questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and power. At the center of his oeuvre is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility long ascribed to Black figures in the Western pictorial tradition. 

Made in 2016, Untitled (Woman Looking Left) is a strong example of what the artist calls a “counter-archive” that brings Black figures back into this narrative. While depictions of white figures doing everyday tasks appear throughout the history of western art, Black figures have been largely excluded from such scenes. As Dieter Roelstraete notes, the portrayal of these quotidian situations in Marshall's work is “Fundamentally about representation and rendering present, about being seen and making visible.”