A spectacular example of Kerry James Marshall’s inimitable oeuvre, Untitled (Stono Drawing) is a stirring study for the painting Jemmy aka Cato, one of a group of four works depicting the leader of the Stono Rebellion. Each painting in the series depicts the same figure, Jemmy; as implied by the title of the eventual painting, Jemmy aka Cato, his name has been obscured over the years, readily confused with Cato or Carter – the name of the family who held him in servitude. The rebellion itself was the largest slave uprising to take place in the British colonies: in 1739, Jemmy led eighty enslaved men south in a bid for emancipation, burning the liberated plantations as they marched towards Florida. Before long, the rebels were met and defeated by a colonial militia, who subsequently executed the majority of the men and re-enslaving the remainder. Marshall’s Stono paintings seek both to honor these men, and to put pay to misguided notions of inaction on the part of the enslaved. As Anna Katz has explained, these works “stand as a corrective to the woeful underestimation of the history of resistance to the slave trade and slavery in which black people have been engaged for centuries... a testament to man’s worthiness of portraiture.” (Anna Katz in: Exh. Cat, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (and traveling), Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, April 2016 - July 2017, p. 204)

As with many of Marshall’s works, these drawings seek to address issues that have been historically overlooked and marginalized; by employing the visual vernacular and draughtsmanship of the art historical canon, Marshall’s works expose that same canon’s exclusionary nature and historic failings of representation. Hands bound behind his back, the pose of Marshall’s subject in the present work recalls canonical depictions of St. Sebastian, tied to a stake a shot with arrows by the Romans in the name of his faith. By aligning his subject with St. Sebastian, Marshall questions the distinction drawn between these two figures; historical descriptions of the Stono rebellion are still couched in a language that betrays a sense of condemnation for the rebels, whereas Sebastian, who was killed for rebuking the Romans emperor Diocletian for his cruelty to the Christians, is universally held up as a martyr for his faith and defense of the defenseless. Marshall’s emphasis on the taut musculature of his subject also demonstrates the inspiration he draws from Italian Renaissance draughtsman such as Leonardo and Michelangelo, but perhaps more than either, the enduring influence of his teacher at the Otis Art Institute, Charles White. Like Marshall, White used his art as a vehicle for social justice, and his idiosyncratic style, which featured high contrast contouring of his subjects’ faces and bodies, is reflected in the white highlights that pepper the composition of the present work.

Achieving a fascinating interplay between light and shadow, figure and ground, Untitled (Stono Drawing) emphatically testifies to the virtuosic technical abilities that have distinguished Marshall as amongst the most gifted figurative artists working today. Isolated within the cream expanse of the sheet, the gleaming darkness of the central figure is all the more striking; invoking the work of great abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, the deep hues of Marshall’s ground and figure at once engage and offset each other to create a work in which the subtlest highlight acts as crucial compositional element. Set against the whiteness of the sheet, the deliberate and dramatic darkness of Marshall’s figure casts the artist’s extraordinary examination of the color black into exhilarating relief. In her essay for the 2016 Mastry retrospective, scholar Helen Molesworth remarks, “Blackness is not presented by Marshall as an afterthought or as a form of special pleading; it is offered as a radical presence that shows how the very notions of beauty and truth that paintings and museums hold to be self-evident are premised on exclusions that are ethically, philosophically, and aesthetically untenable.” (Helen Molesworth in: Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, 2016, p. 37) When questioned about the uncompromising blackness of his figures, the artist himself remarked, “Extreme blackness plus grace equals power. I see the figures as emblematic; I’m reducing complex variations of tone to rhetorical dimension: blackness.” (the artist quoted in: ibid., p. 59)

Artist

Kerry James Marshall