From the New York Times Street Art Comes In From the Cold “Kerry James Marshall stands before a canvas the size of a movie screen. The milky greens, blues and pinks, rendered in paint-by-number patterns and connect-the-dots figures, seem as if they might swallow him and his id whole. But Mr. Marshall and, he hopes, visitors to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art can hold the Crayola madness in check by studying silhouettes embedded in the landscape.
The two three-story murals depict Mount Vernon and Monticello, the estates of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Planted in Where’s Waldo fashion among the bushes and trees in this childlike maze are outlines of the slaves who maintained the estates of a new nation’s champions of liberty.
“The coloring book stuff seduces people to become engaged and has them acknowledge the subtext of these places at the same time,” said Mr. Marshall, who painted the work over a two-week period last month with a crew of local muralists.
Mr. Marshall, a Chicago artist known for exploring racial identity and black history, said he wants people to acknowledge the contradictions that underlie the veneration of the founding fathers. “I think a more realistic representation is appropriate,” he said, rather “than the kind of mythologizing that goes with Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and Washington as the father of the country.”
Although he developed the sketches long before Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he said, the election of the country’s first African-American president makes the mural as relevant as ever. The mythic sense of power and leadership, the ability to save the nation with which the people endowed Washington and Jefferson applies to President Obama as well, he said. Yet because Mr. Obama’s success is exceptional, he added, it will remain problematic until it becomes common. “I think one always has to understand how complicated America is and start to be more specific about the kinds of changes they think can take place and will take place,” he said.
In many ways the political goals of this work by Mr. Marshall resonate with the mural tradition here. More than 1,000 murals are on view across San Francisco, addressing subjects like the plight of immigrants and farm workers, the impact of the political wars in Central America in the 1980s, AIDS in Africa, gentrification in San Francisco and the joys of bicycling and buying locally grown produce. ” Read the rest here.
