On the third floor of the Harvard Art Museum, there hangs a self-portrait of Kerry James Marshall, depicting the African American artist with a large, colorful paint palette in his right hand. Across the room rests an old, wooden arm-chair in a glass display case, used by the President of Harvard on special occasions such as convocations and commencements. These two seemingly dissimilar objects echo each other in intricate ways, and they bring about a unique part of Harvard’s history to the thousands of visitors yearning to learn about the elite institution. In this paper, I will first describe my journey in visiting these two objects, from the relative positions the curator chose to place these objects in the exhibition to my perception of
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The painting is about six-foot-tall and five-foot-wide, and it almost spans the entire height of the wall. Roughly two inches thick, the clean, white edge adds a tremendous amount of weight and sincerity to the object. The painting is so enormous that the human in the picture is portrayed like a powerful god figure, larger than the average being and staring right down at the viewer. Marshall’s eyes glaze right into the viewer’s eyes from above, as if the painting is trying to communicate a serious and meaningful message.
Oftentimes people use self-portraits to reveal moral and psychological features about themselves or the society in which they live. For instance, with the rise of camera technology and social media, many people use “selfies”, a form of self-portraits, to express their personal identity online. What kind of personal identity is Kerry James Marshall intending to express? Upon reviewing more of Kerry James Marshall’s artwork on the internet, I discovered that Marshall often uses large-scale paintings to present “…the historically and socially potent struggles of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.” Using this piece of information, my interpretation of the portrait becomes clear: Marshall depicts himself painting the color of his skin using the flattest and most ignored color on the palette, similar how African Americans historically are treated as the lowest members of the color America. This brings attention to society’s embedded and lingering racism, particularly as evidenced by the abstract geometric space in which the human subjects exist, an unrealistic limbo in which blacks are forced to
The painting is about six-foot-tall and five-foot-wide, and it almost spans the entire height of the wall. Roughly two inches thick, the clean, white edge adds a tremendous amount of weight and sincerity to the object. The painting is so enormous that the human in the picture is portrayed like a powerful god figure, larger than the average being and staring right down at the viewer. Marshall’s eyes glaze right into the viewer’s eyes from above, as if the painting is trying to communicate a serious and meaningful message.
Oftentimes people use self-portraits to reveal moral and psychological features about themselves or the society in which they live. For instance, with the rise of camera technology and social media, many people use “selfies”, a form of self-portraits, to express their personal identity online. What kind of personal identity is Kerry James Marshall intending to express? Upon reviewing more of Kerry James Marshall’s artwork on the internet, I discovered that Marshall often uses large-scale paintings to present “…the historically and socially potent struggles of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.” Using this piece of information, my interpretation of the portrait becomes clear: Marshall depicts himself painting the color of his skin using the flattest and most ignored color on the palette, similar how African Americans historically are treated as the lowest members of the color America. This brings attention to society’s embedded and lingering racism, particularly as evidenced by the abstract geometric space in which the human subjects exist, an unrealistic limbo in which blacks are forced to