RESIDUAL EFFECTS: KERRY JAMES MARSHALL

A Kerry James Marshall painting sold for $5 million, but he didn’t see any of it

PAINTING THE TOWNS: Kerry James Marshall Set For Major Three-City Retrospective

Text | Hedy Weiss for The Chicago Sun-Times

Published | January 24, 2016

In many ways, Chicago-based artist Kerry James Marshall has depicted the African American experience on canvas much as playwright August Wilson chronicled it for the theater. And beginning this spring, Marshall’s work will be seen in its first retrospective exhibition, “KJM: Mastry,” which will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (April 23 – Sept. 25, 2016), move on to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Oct. 25, 2016 – Jan. 29, 2017), and finally be on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (March 21 – July 2, 2017).

Considered one of America’s greatest living painters, Marshall (who lives in Bronzeville with his wife, actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce) has worked at capturing the African-American experience for more than three decades, creating large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits that suggest narratives of African-American history from slave ships to contemporary culture. In the process, he has drawn on his deep knowledge of art history – from the Renaissance to 20th-century abstraction, making such additional sources as the comic book and the muralist tradition part of the mix. The result is a wide range of intimate scenes of black middle-class life, painted in vibrant color and with detailed patterning.

The exhibition, which will include about 70 works, will focus on Marshall’s paintings – from his seminal statement in “Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980), to his most recent explorations of African-American history. Organized in broadly chronological order, the exhibition will consider the dominant themes in his work: History painting, landscape, portraiture, the nude, religion, and abstraction. A selection of drawings, and works of related media such as photography, video, and sculpture, also will be on view.

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CHEERS: Kerry James Marshall Delivers A Stunner at Zwirner Gallery in London

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Rapunzel), 2014, Acrylic on PVC panel, 24 x 30 inches. Image via davidzwirner.com 

Text | Andrew Russeth for ARTNews.com
Published | October 13, 2014

Just how good is Kerry James Marshall’s show at David Zwirner in London’s Mayfair district? So good that the second I left today I began plotting the next time that I could sneak out of the Frieze Art Fair this week to give it another view. Plenty of shows open here in the coming days, and there are plenty more that I have yet to see, but so far Marshall’s seems like the most exciting one in town. People are talking about it.

Titled “Look See,” this is his first solo appearance in London since 2005, and his first show with Zwirner. He has delivered a knockout. Fifty-nine on Friday, he has hung 14 new paintings, most of solitary people, who are posing for a screen, or for themselves, or even for you. The mood is intimate, erotic, and occasionally voyeuristic. They may make you uncomfortable—like you are peering in on a private moment—but you will not want to look away.

These are formidable, alluring objects, painted on thick PVC panels. Their surfaces are flat, but the brushstrokes, patterning, and color they contain are luscious. The subject of Untitled (Sofa Girl) (all works 2014), for instance, reclines alone on Daniel Buren-striped fabric, cloaked in a deep-blue-purple-black darkness, remote in hand, watching a television set that is just out of view, but which casts a slight glow over room. She has short hair, a facial expression that is a rare mixture of exhausted, amazed, and dazed—the face of insomnia-induced TV binges (a rare sight in art, but one you have felt)—and an adorable, very sleepy cat. It is an incredible painting, complex but immediate.

Read complete story here.

LONDON: Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Club Couple), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel, 59 5/8 x 59 5/8 inches (151.5 x 151.5 cm).
Image via davidzwirner.com. 

Kerry James Marshall: Look See

October 10 – November 22, 2014

Kerry James Marshall in conversation with Angela Choon, Senior Partner at David Zwirner, Saturday, October 11, 2014, 11am

Free and open to the public, but reservations are required

RSVP to charlotte@davidzwirner.com

DAVID ZWIRNER

24 Grafton Street

London, UK

From David Zwirner press release:

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Kerry James Marshall. On view at the London gallery, this is the artist’s first solo show in the city since his 2005 presentation at the Camden Arts Centre. It is concurrent with the travelling exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, currently on view at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (both through 26 October 2014).

With a career spanning almost three decades, Marshall is well known for his paintings depicting actual and imagined events from African-American history. His complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes synthesize different traditions and genres, while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Engaging with issues of identity and individualism, he frequently depicts his figures in an extreme opaque, black colour, which stylizes their appearance while being a literal and rhetorical reference to the term black and its diametric opposition to the white “mainstream.” With art history today acknowledged as having been written from the perspective of white Western artists, Marshall assimilates the limitations and contradictions inherent in its styles, subjects, and chronologies, creating highly personalised works that appear recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time.

Marshall also produces drawings in the style of comic strips, as well as sculptural installations, photography, and video. Like his paintings, these works accumulate various stylistic influences to address the historiography of black art, while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that they are not inherently partisan because their subjects are black.

For his first show with David Zwirner, Marshall will present new paintings that collectively examine notions of observing, witnessing, and exhibiting. While central to the relationship between viewer and artwork, these overarching concepts are typically steeped in conventions that render them passive acts. Yet, Marshall’s works subtly defy genre expectations and invite idiosyncratic, often ambiguous interpretations. Entitled Look See, the exhibition takes its point of departure in the etymological difference between looking and seeing, which embodies varying degrees of attentiveness. While “looking” is generally understood to be a removed, detached action, “seeing” involves perception and making connections between elements.

Works on view depict a series of characters amid ornate backdrops and dressed in outfits designed specifically for the paintings over a period of several years. Many emphasize the idea of display, such as Untitled (Crowning Moment), Marshall’s portrait of a young woman wearing an elaborate headband—based on a news photograph of a contestant putting on the winning crown at a beauty pageant—and Untitled (Beach Towel) in which the reclining female in a garden setting looks past the viewer to a camera not visible in the composition. In Untitled (Club Couple), a smiling couple poses blatantly as the male figure implicates the viewer in his plans by showing a small box with an engagement ring behind his girlfriend’s back. The exhibitionism inherent in such paintings—putting oneself on view—echoes the notion of pure presentation that runs throughout the artist’s new works. Marshall’s characters offer themselves to be looked at or are actively engaged with looking at something, including themselves.

Untitled (Mirror Girl), correspondingly, can only be seen in a mirror, where she appears to pose for her own enjoyment. In Untitled (Pink Towel), no indication is given to the identity of the woman, nude except for a towel that she holds up to casually cover her body. Looking straight at the viewer, her tilted head and pearl earring can be seen to imbue the everyday scene with an art-historical reference to Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s well-known portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665).

In the large-scale Untitled (Studio), Marshall depicts the process of a model having her portrait painted. The messy paints smattered across the table, floor, and even the resting dog further offer a metaphor for the staged nature of each of the works. The sense of fabrication is underscored by the unconventional clothing worn by most of the characters, created for the series as for a play or a movie. Yet while their peculiar combination of realism and fiction can be seen to connect the works conceptually—and also defines an immediacy rarely found in contemporary painting—each retains a singularity that seems to suggest that nothing has come before it. In Untitled (Blot), a single abstract canvas, also on a large scale, underscores the delicate link between representation and the real world more generally. As with Marshall’s wider oeuvre, fabrication here becomes linked to the realisation that the history of art as we know it is itself a construction of particular cultural and political perspectives, and always open to reinvention.

A fully illustrated publication is forthcoming by David Zwirner Books featuring essays by art critic Robert Storr and curator Hamza Walker.

Exhibit Link

SIGNED: Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall. Crowning Moment, 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel. 23 5/8 x 20 7/8 inches (60 x 53 cm).

Image via davidzwirner.com.

Venerable US artist now represented in the UK

From davidzwirner.com:

David Zwirner is pleased to announce that Kerry James Marshall has joined the London gallery, where an exhibition of new work will open in October 2014. This will be the artist’s first solo show in the city since his 2005 presentation at the Camden Arts Centre.   

With a career spanning almost three decades, Marshall is well known for his paintings depicting actual and imagined events from African-American history. His complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes synthesize different traditions and genres, while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Engaging with issues of identity and individualism, he frequently depicts his figures in an extreme opaque, black color, which stylizes their appearance while being a literal and rhetorical reference to the term black and its diametric opposition to the white “mainstream.” With art history today acknowledged as having been written from the perspective of white Western artists, Marshall assimilates the limitations and contradictions inherent in its styles, subjects, and chronologies, creating highly personalized works that appear recognizable and unfamiliar at the same time.

Marshall also produces drawings in the style of comic books, sculptural installations, photography, and video. As with his paintings, these works accumulate various stylistic influences to address the historiography of black art, while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that they are not inherently partisan because their subjects are black. 

For his first show with David Zwirner, Marshall will present new paintings that collectively examine notions of observing, witnessing, and exhibiting. While central to the relationship between viewer and artwork, these overarching concepts are typically steeped in conventions that render them passive acts. Marshall veers away from common expectations of how works are displayed to be seen, using the etymological differences between looking and seeing as his point of departure for a series of portraits where the subjects’ dissociated stares seem as defiant as they are mystifying. A fully illustrated book is forthcoming by the gallery’s new publishing program. 

Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama. He studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, earning his B.F.A. in 1978 and an honorary doctorate in 1999. 

Marshall has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States since the late 1970s and early 1980s. His work is currently the subject of a major survey entitled Painting and Other Stuff. Marking the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date, the exhibition was ἀrst on view in 2013 at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in Antwerp, before traveling to the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen earlier this year. The show is co-hosted by two venues in Spain, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (June 11 to October 26, 2014) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid  (June 13 to October 26, 2014). 

Other prominent institutions which have presented solo shows include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2013); Secession, Vienna (2012); Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008); Camden Arts Centre, London (2005); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (both 1998). 

In 2014, Marshall was the recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, an award given annually by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Other prestigious awards include a 1997 grant from the MacArthur Foundation and a 1991 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Marshall lives and works in Chicago.

In addition to David Zwirner, the artist is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Koplin Del Rio in Los Angeles. 

Source Link

VIDEO: Kerry James Marshall - Painting and Other Stuff

Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (28 February – 4 May 2014) from Kunsthal Charlottenborg on Vimeo.

Film & Interview by Rebekka Elisabeth Anker-Møller

From vimeo.com:

Kunsthal Charlottenborg proudly presents the first solo exhibition in Denmark by the renowned and iconic American painter Kerry James Marshall. The exhibition centers on historiography, identity politics and the history and construction of art. The exhibition is the result of the cooperation with three other acknowledged European art institutions: M HKA (Antwerp), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona).

Kerry James Marshall, Mementos, 1999. Image via kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk.

Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff

February 28 – May 4,2014

Kunstal Charlottenborg

Nyhaavn 2

Copenhagen, Denmark

Exhibit Link

ANNOUNCEMENT: Obama taps Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall for arts spot

Kerry James Marshall. Photo via ianationalbar.com.

Acclaimed artist selected for President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities

By Lynn Sweet for voices.suntimes.com, November 18, 2013:

President Barack Obama tapped Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall, a former professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago for a spot on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The National Gallery of Art is featuring his work in an exhibit closing next month.

From the National Gallery: “One of the most celebrated painters currently working in the United States, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) has exhibited widely in both this country and around the world. His work explores the experiences of African Americans and the narratives of American history that have often excluded black people. Drawing upon the artist’s prodigious knowledge of art history and the African diaspora, his paintings combine figurative and abstract styles and multiple allusions, drawing from “high” and “low” sources.”

From the White House: “Kerry James Marshall is an independent artist with solo and group exhibitions, public projects, and public collections displayed in museums around the United States, including the National Gallery of Art. He works across a broad range of media, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, performance, and installations. He was a tenured professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago until 2006. Mr. Marshall worked as production designer for the feature films Daughters of the Dust and Sankofa. In 1997, he received a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is a board member of the advisory board of the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Tiffany Foundation, and previously served on the advisory board of the Artadia Foundation. Mr. Marshall received a B.F.A. from the Otis Arts Institute.”

Source Link 

Chicago artist picked for presidential panel

NEW YORK: Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall, On Sale  Black Friday, 2012, Acrylic on board, 71 5/8 x 39 3/4 x 2 3/4 inches.
Image courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.

DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR

September 10 – October 12, 2013

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 10th, from 5 – 8 PM at 524 West 24th Street.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 West 20^th Street

New York, NY

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR, an exhibition of sculpture and paintings by Kerry James Marshall.

Marshall is known for his figurative paintings that challenge and engage Western art history while making black identity and representation their prime subject. Marrying formal rigor and social engagement, his practice also encompasses sculpture, installation, photography and minimalist painting that strive toward a literal and conceptual black aesthetic. A radical pragmatist, Marshall recognizes the art world is not an autonomous "free" space, but is simply one component of the larger socio-economic order in which we operate. Marshall explores visibility within the canon and the consumption of culture as currency in this exhibition of recent works.

99 cent piece (One hundred thirty six thousand dollars in change) addresses value in artwork and beyond by simultaneously embodying high and low aesthetic ideals. A group of large scale coins with a flawless brass patina add up to 99 cents and lay as if haphazardly tossed on the floor. While 99 cents evokes low value, a bargain, pocket change or the ubiquitous 99-cent-stores full of cheap items, the piece itself is beautifully and expensively fabricated as referenced in the title’s parenthetical. Marshall takes out the mediating object of the Readymade and self-reflexively

focuses on the money itself.

A series of paintings with similarly provocative titles including Red Hot Deal, Why Pay More, On Sale Black Friday, Black Owned and Buy Black further provide a framework for this confluence of money, power, agency, autonomy and access, explored through a linchpin of language and symbols. Marshall creates an alternate archive that acknowledges the real-politic of the art making enterprise.

Kerry James Marshall lives and works in Chicago. Kerry James Marshall: In the Tower is currently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, through December 7, 2013. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium, October 4, 2013 – February 2, 2014. The exhibition will travel to the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; Antoni Tapies Foundation, Barcelona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Exhibit Link

COVER: Kerry James Marshall / Mousse / Issue 39 / Summer 2013

The Lack In the Image Bank: Kerry James Marshall’s Reclamation of Pictures

Text | Nav Haq

Excerpt:

To what extent has our imaginary been colonized by stereotypical scenes, from art history and the world of media, whose protagonists are Caucasian figures? Might this not be both the cause and effect of our acute perception of “otherness,” with its wealth of negative implications? Kerry James Marshall, in his wide-ranging pictorial research, analyzes the condition of images, coming to terms with art history, contemporary icons and the dictatorship of an iconographic imaginary that is intrinsically discriminatory, showing how art can become a tool of reappropriation and expansion of our collective unconscious.

Mousse Magazine Issue 39 is on newsstands now.

Full article can be read online here.

WASHINGTON DC: Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall, Plunge, 1992, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 87 x 109 inches. Collection of Geri and Mason Haupt.
© Kerry James Marshall. Image via artfixdaily.com.

In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall

June 28 – December 07, 2013

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

East Building Tower

6^th Street and Constitution Avenue NW

Washington, DC

From the National Gallery of Art web site:

One of the most celebrated painters currently working in the United States, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) has exhibited widely in both this country and around the world. His work explores the experiences of African Americans and the narratives of American history that have often excluded black people. Drawing upon the artist’s prodigious knowledge of art history and the African diaspora, his paintings combine figurative and abstract styles and multiple allusions, drawing from “high” and “low” sources.

In 2010, the National Gallery acquired Marshall’s Great America (1994), a depiction of four figures in a boat exiting an amusement park Tunnel of Love. Including 10 paintings and more than 20 drawings, this exhibition—Marshall’s first in Washington—explores a sequence of works that both precede and follow Great America, affording a context for its powerful imagery. The dominant theme of these works is the transport of African slaves to America in the Middle Passage—the second or “middle” leg of the triangular trade of manufactured goods, slaves, and crops that transpired between Europe, Africa, and the American colonies from the colonial period until the middle of the 19th century. Marshall’s works explore the economic, sociological, and psychological aftermath of this foundational episode of US history. In his art, the past is never truly past: history exerts a constant, often unconscious pressure on the living.

Exhibit Link

Kerry James Marshall Selects

(Film series curated by Kerry James Marshall)

Kerry James Marshall: In the Tower

(Washington Post article)

ST. LOUIS: Kerry James Marshall

Image via camstl.org.

The Front Room: Kerry James Marshall

May 24 – July 7, 2013

Artist Talk: Wednesday, May 22, 2013, 7pm

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST LOUIS

3750 Washington Boulevard

St. Louis, MO

From CAM web site:

CAM presents a project by Kerry James Marshall—one of America’s most significant living artists—as part of its ongoing Front Room series. Based in Chicago, Marshall is internationally celebrated for a sophisticated and diverse body of work that addresses the complex history of African American life and culture and the artist’s role as an interpreter of that legacy.  While his paintings intertwine compositional and stylistic sensibilities from throughout art history, he has expanded his practice to incorporate work in sculpture, graphic narratives, and video in recent years. His project for CAM’s Front Room will be new work that will respond directly to the specific dynamics of the gallery space. It is scheduled to coincide with the June 2013 opening of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s new East Building expansion, where Marshall’s iconic work Watts 1963 (1995) will be on view.

Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and lives and works in Chicago. In 2013 his work will be presented in solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, Belgium. Other one-person exhibitions include presentations at the Secession, Vienna (2012), the Millstone Gallery, Washington University, St. Louis (2011), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2010), the Camden Arts Centre, London (2005), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003.) His work has been featured in such prominent group exhibitions as Take me to Your Leader: The Great Escape into Space, National Museum of Art, Oslo, and Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (both 2010); 30 Americans, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida (2008); the Venice Biennale (2003), the 1999/2000 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, (1999), and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997).

This exhibition is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and curated by Dominic Molon, Chief Curator.

Exhibit Link

Kerry James Marshall promises something ‘elaborate’at Contemporary

COVER: Kerry James Marshall / art ltd. / July-August 2012

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
Text | Caroline Picard

In his newest work, the rigorously subversive Chicago painter unzips Barnett Newman

Excerpt:

In response to an agonizing absence of diversity in the canon of Western painting, Marshall inserts and asserts the black figure again and again in as many different poses, positions, moods and lifestyles as possible. In Garden Projects, he made large-scale landscapes of city housing projects that incorporate "gardens" into their names highlighting the dissonance between their idealized titles and the neglected circumstances that surround their residents. One such painting, Watts 1963, shows three black children pressing towards the front of the picture plane; white abstract blobs disrupt the otherwise representational landscape behind them like ghosts. Above, Disney-esque blue birds carry a somber banner reading "Here we rest." In his series Souvenir, Marshall painted middle-class African American living rooms whose inhabitants tend to the memories of Civil Rights figures from the 1960s--paintings that both celebrate history yet remain restrained: the houses he captures are perfectly staged, as if careful attention was paid to each object inside. Marshall is not only a painter, however. He has also made a comic book, "RYTHM MASTR," installations, video and sculpture: for instance a series of massive rubber stamps that lay down Civil Rights phrases, like BLACK POWER, which become neutered and ambivalent in the gallery setting. Often he incorporates glitter. In Vignettes, a more recent rococo series, he portrays black lovers playing in fields. In response to a book that Taschen put out, "The Great American Pin-Up" (which included no African-American women) Marshall painted black pin-ups. He regularly references other famous paintings in his work, binding his conceptual intent to technique and craft.

Click here to read complete story.

IN THE STUDIO: Kerry James Marshall / Art + Auction / July-August 2012

IN THE STUDIO: KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
Text | Rachel Wolff
Photographs | Kendall Karmanian


Art-historical references mix seamlessly with sociopolitical commentary in the Chicago painter's grand yet humble works.


Excerpt:

Marshall has long been admired in and beyond the art world for the ways in which he manages to both celebrate and scrutinize the African-American experience, and his Vienna-bound new work [Vienna Secession on view September 21 through November 25, 2012] continues in this vein. "There is a longing to love oneself that informs everything black people do in the United States," he says. "There are not any black people who do not feel some dimension of that in their lives. If they say they don't, they're lying."

Pick up a copy of the July/August 2012 issue of Art + Auction to read the complete story. 

View Art +Auction video interview with Kerry James Marshall here.

CAPTURED: Kerry James Marshall and Theaster Gates

BlackArtistNews photo. All rights reserved.

Kerry James Marshall and Theaster Gates take a moment to smile for BlackArtistNews during a recent event at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. 

NEW EDITIONS: Available printworks by Kerry James Marshall

Koplin Del Rio Gallery presents recent works on paper by Kerry James Marshall. 

Keeping the Culture, 2011

8 printed layers: Seven silkscreen with top layer linocut on arches paper

Image size: 17.5 x 27 inches; Paper size: 22 x 30 inches

Edition of 100

Available for viewing at Koplin Del Rio.

 Untitled (Woman), 2010

Hardground etching

22.5 x 19 inches

Edition of 50

Available upon order.

Untitled (Handsome Young Man), 2010

Hardground etching

22.5 x 19 inches

Edition of 50

Available upon order.

Frankenstein, 2010

Hardground etching

22.5 x 19 inches

Edition of 50

Available upon order.

Bride of Frankenstein, 2010

Hardground etching

22.5 x 19 inches

Edition of 50

Available upon order.

Vignette (Wishing Well), 2010

Color aquatint etching

53 x 41 inches

Edition of 50

Available upon order.

Please contact the gallery for more information.

310.836.9055 | info@koplindelrio.com

The focus of Koplin Del Rio Gallery is contemporary painting, drawing, and sculpture of established, internationally known artists, as well as emerging California artists. The gallery's main emphasis is representational, figurative, landscape, and still-life works.

Koplin Del Rio online

AUCTION: Art, photo collection going up for bids after being seized from Birmingham attorney

It's the real thing by Hank Willis Thomas is being auctioned November 16th by the IRS in Birmingham, AL.

IRS to auction off art, photo collection seized from Birmingham attorney

Text: Stan Diel | Birmingham News

Published: November 1, 2011

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- A large collection of photographs and paintings, including many by emerging African-American artists, will be sold at an IRS auction later this month after being seized from a prominent Birmingham attorney to settle a tax debt.

The collection of about 250 paintings and photographs by artists including William Eggleston and Mickalene Thomas has been appraised at more than $500,000 and was seized by the IRS from Russell J. Drake, of the Birmingham firm Whatley Drake & Kallas.

Drake, in an interview Monday, said art is his passion, particularly the work of emerging young African-American artists, and he's saddened to see the collection go.

"I regret that I'm in this position," he said. "The recession had a devastating effect on me. It was sort of a perfect storm for a lot of lawyers."

According to documents on file in Jefferson County Probate Court, the IRS filed two liens against Drake totaling about $497,000. He said that's "an old number," and is no longer representative of what he owes the IRS.

Regardless, the collection could raise a substantial amount, said Roberta Colee, the IRS liquidation specialist handling the sale. About 50 different artists and photographers are represented, including Kerry James Marshall, Raymond Pettibon and Mark Flood.

Marshall, a Birmingham native who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, was featured on the PBS program "Art 21" and is known for paintings and sculpture that pay tribute to the civil rights struggle. New York artist Mickalene Thomas is famous for her enamel and sequined paintings of women, which the New York Times called "as impenetrable as they are spectacular."

One of her works, a painting of a topless prostitute titled "She works hard for the money," was pulled from the sale after it was judged too provocative by the IRS. At least two other of her works remain in the auction.

To casual observers, though, the photographer Hank Willis Thomas may be the most recognizable. The collection includes at least two photos by Thomas, who is perhaps best known for his "Priceless #1," a satirical take on the "priceless" Mastercard commercials that makes a powerful statement about inner-city violence.

The piece includes text placed over a photo of a grieving African-American family. It says "3-piece suit: $250; new socks: $2; 9mm pistol: $79; gold chain: $400; bullet: 60 cents ... Picking the perfect casket for your son: Priceless."

Thomas, a graduate of California College of Fine Arts' masters program and artist in residence at Johns Hopkins University, once lectured at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

The art may be sold individually or in the aggregate, with a minimum bid of $20,000, the IRS said in a prepared statement.

DETAILS 
What: IRS auction of about 250 paintings and photographs 
When: 9 a.m. Nov. 16. Registration and viewing begins at 8 a.m. The art also can be viewed Nov. 15 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. 
Where: Embassy Suites Hotel, 2300 Woodcrest Place, Birmingham, AL

© 2011 al.com. All rights reserved.

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