CAA Limited-Edition Prints
Kerry James Marshall, May 15, 2001, 2004
Four-color screenprint on Arches 88 paper, 21½ x 15¾ in., edition of 60
Price
SOLD OUT $1,000 $300 CAA individual and institutional members
$1,250 $450 Nonmembers
Add $250 for framing (maple cap with natural finish)
Add $50 for shipping and handling
About the Work
May 15, 2001 resembles a grocery store’s advertising circular. Instead of depicting vegetables or canned goods, Kerry James Marshall “advertises” works by modern and contemporary artists, along with their auction prices, from a sale at Sotheby’s held on May 15, 2001. Like all of Marshall’s work, this image percolates with embedded references to the African American experience and the traditions of art history: the names of Caucasian artists and artists of color are intermingled and some are occluded; salient at upper left is a blurry, iconic little reproduction of Jeff Koons’s garish gilt ceramic portrait of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), from that artist’s Banality series. The figure, racially ambiguous and ambiguously parodic, sets off a sequence of reverberations that ripple through the image: Koons to Lichtenstein to Warhol to Pollock; Jackson to Basquiat to Puryear to Gallagher. Black and white artists intermingle, their values declared in fat, deadpan numbers and their boldface names claiming the visual space once granted to visual images. In this context, Basquiat’s tiny black silhouette Furious Man (1982) appears in skeptical dialogue with Koons’s more placid sculpture.
In keeping with one of Marshall’s longstanding preoccupations, May 15, 2001 also makes layered references to art history. The artist slyly acknowledges the critical interventions of Hans Haacke and the Guerrilla Girls, who have harshly interrogated the financial underpinnings of the art world, and provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, now temporarily restored to their original nonart place on the shelves of the American supermarket.
Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1978 and an honorary doctorate there in 1999. Since 1993, he has been a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In 1997 Marshall was awarded the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.