Kerry James Marshall Moving the Outside Inside

This article investigates how Kerry James Marshall’s polymorphous and art historically conscious practice can be positioned within the discourse on blackness in contemporary art. It examines how his work, which is steeped in black history and black popular culture, embraces blackness as a signifier of difference to critically address the marginalisation of blacks in the visual sphere. The sidelining of black artists, especially in large museum collections, has been the norm and a manifestation of the absence of black art and artists from the Western canon of art. Only within the last two decades have art historians, in an interdisciplinary effort with other scholars, drawn attention to this deficit through such anti-Eurocentric investigations as Postcolonialism or Afro-Modernism. Kerry James Marshall’s artistic activism has successfully contributed its part by insisting that an identity-based, specifically black aesthetic be made visible and brought into the fold of the grand narrative of art. © 2017 Third Text.