Week 1: Art in the Atrium by Kerry James Marshall

Monticello and Mount Vernon,the homes of American presidents Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, were both painted by Kerry James Marshall in 2009. They are currently exposed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Kerry James Marshall plays with colors and forms: looking carefully at the landscapes, we can find hidden heads and figures of slaves, suggested in the shadows , in the trees and in the water behind Mount Vernon.Indeed, Kerry Marshall tried using various colors for his paintings but at the same time, when drawing the hidden slaves, tried using the same colors as the background, to actually hide them. So in the trees for example, he uses a darker green but still a green to paint his slaves. Also, in both art works you can see dots that once connected, representing more slaves who worked on these plantations.
 In fact, Kerry James Marshall, an African American artist, has fully realized how people of colors have been left out of pictures during the life times of Jefferson and Washington. Acknowledging this, he studied history and its representation in works of art, to come up with this "visual game of seeking and finding the hidden meaning of each picture".  Indeed, he presents here two new paintings as puzzles, his purpose being to let the viewers connect the dots and discover for themselves what message he delivers throughout his work: slaves were part of the life of these two presidents, and throughout them, important to everyone. They cannot be forgotten.
Seeing these two paintings, i believe that this art work influence people in a way that, everyone who actually sees this work, realize how slaves were part of the American history. Indeed, they often are left out but they were here doing most of the work that others wouldn't do.They took part in building this country and making it what it is today. And Kerry James Marshall, throughout his pictures, help us remembering it and acknowledging too that, by hiding them in his pictures, that they actually were hidden from all art work for a long time.




http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/388
www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/marshall