By Rael Salley

In these days of uncertainty, it surely would be comforting to have a grasp of one true thing. After all, our environment is still deteriorating, unemployment rates are still high (despite the optimism of recent surveys), and thwarting, combating and/or punishing acts of terrorism are daily concerns in the United States. It is a good thing the whole “race thing” has taken a backseat. After all, the major problem in the U.S. is no longer “the color line,” as W.E.B. DuBois asserted. Dark-skinned people are still harassed and incarcerated at alarming rates, but hip-hop is now mainstream music, so all’s well. The Civil Rights movement is now history. Dark-skinned actors, athletes, and entertainers are on television constantly, so the failure of public school education in inner cities — where a major percentage of the citizenry is Black or Hispanic — is overlooked, and no longer registers as a major issue. The “art world,” the term that often refers to an amalgam of artists, art dealers, and art collectors, now has its stable of established “Black” artists that can be called upon to assert the identity politics that will surely “spice-up” any exhibition. This way, galleries, museums and other art-oriented organizations simultaneously avert cries of discrimination and pull in patrons from diverse ethnic backgrounds. I am being ironic to highlight a trend. Essentializing petty issues into bite-sized, digestible pieces, while exaggerating to make them seem poignant, has become a staple of everyday life — even artistic life.

It is in this climate that the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago presents Kerry James Marshall’s One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics. The title implies a presentation of, or at least a quest for, certainty. But upon entering the exhibition space, a viewer can quickly apprehend irony in the heading. Marshall presents painting, photographs, video, sculpture, and installation. The media overlap and intertwine, presenting the viewer with complex visual problems. The conundrums continue as viewers encounter the work of guest artists; works embedded in Marshall’s show that offset traditional ideas of a “solo” show. The works operate on a multitude of visual levels, and Marshall attempts to address concerns inherent in each medium. It is only after the encounter with visual complexity that one can begin to peel layers of conceptual intent, and begin to wonder: ”What is the relationship between all of these diverse creations?”

Marshall, an artist now based in Chicago, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. He then moved to the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, in 1963. Birmingham was where the civil rights movement attained pivotal resolutions. Watts in South Central Los Angeles was close to the headquarters of the Black Panthers, an activist organization committed to battling racial inequity. Marshall states that he could not see the “kinds of things I saw in my developmental years and not speak about it.” A nationally-acclaimed artist now at mid-career, Marshall received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Otis Art Institute, and was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1985. He has received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation award, and has been featured at Documenta 10, the Whitney Biennial, and the Carnegie International. His work is also included in national collections. Since 1993 he has been a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A prominent piece in One True Thing draws from the experience of living on the south side of Chicago. Marshall is primarily known for his paintings, which are usually large, and reference a tradition of history paintings. “7am Sunday Morning,” completed in 2003, is a street scene from Chicago’s south side; the viewpoint is facing north, confronted with an array of activity. There is a figure, a black male, in the foreground crossing the street towards us. The buildings opposite this crossing figure house a beauty salon and a liquor store, not yet open. Other people mill around in front of the buildings, waiting to make their purchases; there are four men in front of the liquor store. A joke (pernicious though it may be) goes that there are three essentials in a Black neighborhood: a beauty parlor, a liquor store, and a church. We find the church on the right side of the painting. It is obscured by a brilliant refraction of sunlight that really should dominate all of the other elements in the painting.

to render the visual puzzle of the refraction by weaving it into the composition; it holds its place unassumingly. Music comes from an apartment building on the left of the picture plane. Marshall paints musical notes floating out of the windows. The notes demonstrate a playfulness that can be found elsewhere in Marshall’s work. The act of rendering the sun’s glare, or refracted light, makes reference to photography. More importantly, it connects photography to painting, while still Marshall has managedmaintaining a division between the two. Marshall uses classical composition and stylized rendering that resonates throughout the history of painting. The decision to render a glare is a subtly elegant one; the glare is of the type often captured in snapshot photographs. If one thinks of the subject matter in “7am Sunday Morning” as conceptually tied to an attempt to present varieties of Black experience, it could be tied to the history of segregation. As a result of segregation, the south side of Chicago still maintains predominantly Black communities, many of which are low in income, but high in crime rate. In the perspectival distance of the painting is downtown, the Loop area, and then the north side of Chicago, traditionally populated by some mixed, but predominantly white communities.

“7am Sunday Morning” demonstrates the complexity of the subject at hand. Marshall draws upon decades of artistic experience to present a group of works that, each in their own right, address disparate topics. This facility and range of interest is to the artist’s credit.

This writer wonders, though, what it means for the Museum of Contemporary Art to have an exhibition that raises this issue of Black aesthetics. Has a pluralistic worldview become so popular? Perhaps it is a reaction to political developments in the United States. The museum is an institution interested in promoting culture, yes, but also interested in making money while doing so. Perhaps the MCA shows its hand, ever so slightly, with the catalog essay “Guidance for African-American Museum Support Groups.” The essay begins by pointing out that in recent years African Americans have become increasingly involved in the “mainstream of the fine-arts museum world,” and African American museum support groups represent one such involvement. The organizations have assisted mainstream art museums by “raising funds and have focused on developing varying aspects of art museums’ collections.” The essay goes on to describe value-based funding, archiving and education, the cultural grid, investment and banking, and ends up describing how such groups can become involved and proceed in assisting the institution.

How does this agenda impact the artwork on display? Marshall’s conceptual targets, not to mention his technical mastery, is tied to a campaign to get not only more African Americans involved in funding art institutions, but also anyone else who might be listening and wondering about Black aesthetics. Is it possible that in a capitalist society, the “One Truth” turns out to be that everything and everyone is hopelessly dependant on money and capital? But I digress. I would rather narrow my interest about truth — stick to artistic concerns, think about race, gender, politics and maybe even class issues — without considering the economic monster that growls from beneath the bed.

Marshall’s exhibition attempts to point out, in no uncertain terms, that there is no “One True Thing” when it comes to Black Aesthetics. Marshall does this with great success. But once this task is accomplished, other matters present themselves for contextualization, redefinition, and clarification. This collision factors into an equation that summates to an incredibly important and groundbreaking effort by Kerry James Marshall.

Images courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)

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