Jacqueline Francis on “The Way Things Are Presented: Kerry James Marshall’s Art of Hanging Pictures, 2002”
In her lecture on October 12, art historian and writer Jacqueline Francis will discuss The Art of Hanging Pictures (2002), a wall-sized installation of photographs obtained, framed, and hung by artist Kerry James Marshall (born 1955). This work, which was included in the artist’s recent traveling retrospective exhibition, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, is uniquely photographic in a practice that is largely dominated by painting. Known for his large-scale, colorful paintings of dignified, hyper-black figures in commonplace settings, Marshall explores how notions of beauty reside in unexpected forms and places.
The photographs, whose subjects range from family snapshots to martyrs of civil rights, present an intriguing turn for Marshall, who is widely known as a painter whose skillful combination of historical and modernist painting techniques yields moving and enigmatic portrayals of black life.
By exploring the world of one artwork—from the contents of the installation to the logic by which the
Jacqueline Francis is Associate Professor and Chair of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. In 2016–2017 she was the Corrigan Visiting Professor of Social Justice at San Francisco State University, and in the spring of