CPAD Community Papers: Contestation and Subversion of Constructs of Race and Gender in the Work of Artists Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley

Glynnis Reed-Conway

Dual Title Ph.D. Candidate in Art Education & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Pennsylvania State University

January 31, 2023

In this paper, I discuss artists Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley as leaders in creative resistance against conventional conceptions and representations of Blackness, gender, and sexuality through their commanding bodies of art. The paintings of the artist Kerry James Marshall appear to contest the dominant culture rather than subvert it. While poised in opposition to legacies of racial domination, Marshall’s work brings heteronormative representations of Black male and female bodies, in contrast to Kehinde Wiley’s multifaceted and oftentimes homoerotic views of masculinity and femininity.

I examine the male gaze in relationship to figures in Marshall’s paintings and the treatment of Black male and female bodies as both subjects and objects. Importantly, Marshall’s use of framing within his compositions directs attention to the gaze of his subjects and engages with the question of who is doing the looking. Are the Black subjects in the paintings looking at us? Marshall’s figures act as universalized Black subjects, with their unapologetic, non-deferential gazes of resistance, power, and beauty. Paul Hoover describes
“the frontality of [Marshall’s] portraits, in which the gaze of the figure, in its coolness, appears to combat the gaze of the viewer” (Hoover, p.731). Hoover goes on to describe “the lack of affect on the faces of the figures, who neither smile nor frown but keep an attentive reserve” (Hoover, p.731) that refuses and eludes the white gaze.

By inserting esoteric imagery and culturally specific iconography in his paintings, Marshall’s works augments his contestation of dominant racial constructs. Marshall’s valorization of Haitian Vodou and African diaspora religions speaks to an oppositional perspective towards the expected allegiances and religious beliefs of Black people. He includes images of vèvès, the Haitian ground drawings that Robert Farris Thompson calls “symmetrically rendered [to] praise and summon…the [Haitian] vodun deities,” (Thompson, 1983) in much of his work from the 1990s. Vèvès appear in some of his later works as well, albeit in more hidden ways. Iconography of African diasporic culture, particularly its spiritual traditions, is a key leitmotif for Marshall.

Marshall weaves in complex references to Haitian deities through his use of vèvès. Metaphysics, numerology, and color powerfully resonate with symbolic meaning in his early paintings. A vèvè that Marshall frequently uses is that of Erzulie, who is known as a Haitian goddess of love, beauty, and femininity in the Vodou tradition. Importantly, Erzulie’s vèvè featuring a large heart is prominent in his composition Could This Be Love (1992). The romantic boudoir space is set with a powerful, knowing Black female figure, fixed in the gesture of removing her clothing, her arms stretched high above her head. She glances at the viewer, satisfied with her desirability and power to enrapture her male companion. With candles lit and the mood set, this couple, dressed only in their undergarments are prepared for intimacy in a bedroom set up as an altar of love.

This multi-dimensional representation of heterosexual Black desire and intimacy departs from dominant cultural representations of Black hypersexuality and notions of inharmonious, discontented relations between Black men and women. His work makes strong efforts to mend conventional ideas about relationships between Black men and women. American culture has so often dehumanized the Black body and attempted to diminish Black people’s sense of agency, including our freedom of sexual choice. Importantly, the female figure in Could This Be Love wields her “power as a woman” as suggested by the title of the book cover that is collaged at the lower part of this large canvas. The female figure is self-possessed and in control of her sexuality, aware of her desirability and how to wield it. At the same time, we know that we are experiencing the scene through the masculine subjectivity of Kerry James Marshall and that in itself frames the rendering as a presentation of a woman as Marshall would like her to be seen.

For Marshall, it is important that his female subjects to be seen as beautiful and desirable. He says of the female figure in Untitled (Beach Towel) [2014]: “She is presenting herself to be made into an image of desire” (Marshall, 2016). The female figures are self-possessed because that is what Marshall wants them to be. This is distinct from how Black women artists create images of women that reveal their own sense of power and sexual agency as seen in the portraits of Deana Lawson, Mickalene Thomas, or Zanele Muholi.

The puzzles that are unlocked through the careful study of Marshall’s Vignettes series are potent revelations of Black resistance to hegemonic systems of domination that range from the fight for freedom from slavery to seeking to live a life economically independent and free from being targets of violence. Marshall disguises multiple clues in his paintings through culturally loaded signifiers and juxtapositions that read markedly different depending on the knowledge base and background of the viewer. For example, for some non-Black viewers, Marshall’s Vignettes read as “images of Black romantic love.” That is one level of signification. However, the Black love he presents is tempered by threats of violence and the dehumanizing effects of racism. Black love survives those threats and is upheld as an important bond, despite the systematic oppression of Black men, women, and children.

The artist Kehinde Wiley presents complex conceptualizations of race, gender, class, and sexuality through his paintings of Black men and women that appropriate the style and subject matter of masterworks by European painters from art history. I assert that Wiley subverts the established order by positioning people of color at the center of a movement that bends the trajectory of art history towards the inclusion of Black people imagined by Black artists. Wiley, very influential among contemporary artists, valorizes the cultural style found in the everyday “realness” of the street couture style of young Black men and women, centering a multidimensional view of contemporary Blackness. Arguably, Wiley has constructed a new canon in which he has imploded existing narratives around identity and developed a sovereign terrain for himself and his diverse cohort of artists of the African diaspora.

Wiley, in his subversive vision urging on the unsettling of the existing order, constructs gender not only to resuscitate the image of Blackness to states of greater complexity, but goes beyond conventional heterosexual constructs to present Black queer aesthetics and desire. A queer Black male artist, Wiley’s gaze upon the male and female body is distinct in the way he challenges dominant cultural images of Black bodies and subjectivities. Wiley once stated that “there’s something decidedly homoerotic about [his studio photo shoots], given that it’s one man deciding to choose another man for aesthetic reasons to be idealized into a large scale painting…” (Lewis, p.88). Wiley uses beauty as a liberatory tool; his depiction of urban working class Black men and women as highly aestheticized, slick objects of beauty shifts the way audiences view these particular individuals, and potentially, how they see Black people like them in real life.

The viewer of a Wiley painting may feel satisfaction in fully understanding what the artist sets out to convey: the creation of a realm of undisputedly sublime representations of Blackness within the confines of an intensely colored decorative background. The background patterning partially overlays the figures and the figure and ground become entwined in a dance within an ornate décor that binds the figure to its ornamental space.

Wiley’s is a Blackness that is redeemed from the narratives of pathology, abjection, terror and hatred that are typically assigned to representations of the Black body in hegemonic White supremacist patriarchal culture. One hopes that Wiley’s portraits encourage a sense of empathy and appreciation of the beauty and humanity of flesh and blood Black men and women by non-Black viewers. At the same time, Wiley’s portraits offer opportunities for Black audiences to find recognition of their own beauty through identification with the exalted figures gracing Wiley’s paintings. Queer men of color, especially queer Black men, may find resonance in viewing images of Black males that defy stereotypical image of “hard,” Black, hypermasculine men that can be oppressive for queer and heterosexual men alike.

Wiley plays on the signifiers of race, class, gender and sexuality, in order to twist the racist, patriarchal tropes impressed on Black masculinity and femininity in service of a vision that disturbs, if not dismantles, the “master’s house” of the art museum (Lorde, 1984) by the commanding and empowered presence of the Black body in that hallowed setting. In harmony with Wiley’s project of visualizing antihegemonic renditions of Black gender performances, Marshall communicates a resistant and contestatory politics of Black individuals striving for unity and agency. Though Marshall’s strategies of resistance in his art are arguably more covert than Wiley’s, both provide Black audiences with models for a more liberatory present and future through their powerful visual narratives of Black life and identities.

References

Hoover, P. (2000). Pair of figures for Eshu: Doubling of consciousness in the work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey. Callaloo, 23(2), 728–748. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2000.0082

Marshall, K.J. (2016). Kerry James Marshall: Self-satisfied. MCA. Retrieved January 31, 2023, from https://mcachicago.org/publications/video/2016/kjm-self-satisfied

Lewis, S. E. (2012). Celebration and Critique. In Kehinde Wiley. essay, Rizzoli.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.

Thompson, R. F. (1983). Flash of the spirit: African and Afro-American art and philosophy. Random House.

Images:

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Club Couple) 2014

Kerry James Marshall, Could This Be Love 1992

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Beach Towel) 2014

Kerry James Marshall, Vignette #15 2014

Kerry James Marshall Vignette IV 2005

Kerry James Marshall Untitled (Underpainting) 2018

Kehinde Wiley Equestrian Portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares 2005

Kehinde Wiley Passing/Posing, St. Remi 2003 (3rd row, far right)