Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post:
Kerry James Marshall is contemporary art’s great engine tinkerer. He wants to know how things work. In the 1990s, when his contemporaries were making slight, cerebral works using found objects, photography and minimalism to poeticize the commonplace or reveal hidden ideologies, Marshall fell in love with the creakingly old idea of paintings as “machines.”“I’ve always wanted to be a history painter on a grand scale like Giotto and Géricault,” he said in 1994. As soon as you get interested in the “how” of things, you become conscious that they might have been done differently. That consciousness may open a crack of potential: They might yet be done differently.
More here.
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