CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, presents "Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics," on view through January 18, 2004. Are you color blind?  Kerry James Marshall challenges the traditions of painting and process and assumptions about Black aesthetics in this major new exhibition that represents the culmination of five years work. On October 25, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, opens Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics with artistic riffs on Black aesthetics by nationally-acclaimed artist Kerry James Marshall, who, at mid-career, has produced his most powerful and controversial works to date.

Known primarily for his monumental paintings of African-American subjects based on the traditional genre of narrative history painting, Marshall works in sculpture, installation, photography, video, and printmaking. This exhibition, anchored by the presence of several new major paintings, will include new works in all of these media and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication on the artist’s work.

Elizabeth Smith, curator of the exhibition and the MCA’s James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, describes the exhibition, “Although the work is, essentially, all new there are common themes that continue to thread through all of his work – his questioning of the nature of art, his engagement with process, and his commitment to ideas and motifs surrounding the representation of African-Americans in our culture. But his ideas have become even more multi-layered leading to some of the most engaging and fascinating work he has ever produced.”

The body of work Marshall has developed for the exhibition centers on the concept of Black aesthetics, simultaneously paying homage to and interrogating the conventions associated with this tradition and its focus on Black history, identity, and culture as reference points. The exhibition will present works in a variety of media, stemming, in part, from his recent Rythm Mastr comic strip project first developed for the 2000 Carnegie International exhibition -- in which an urban superhero battles the forces of evil using a combination of futuristic and traditional African accoutrements.

It will include monumental paintings that portray figures in the urban landscape of the South Side of Chicago, inspired by the tradition of old master paintings. But Marshall plays against the Western art history canon, subverting images from their narrative and recontextualizing them. Marshall is also creating several photographic series depicting urban settings – streetscapes, landscapes, and architecture – that will be interspersed as installations within the exhibition. These works can be ’read’ like a book or a soundtrack, suggesting the passage of time embedded in a sense of place. Several new video and sculptural works will also be presented, as well as a continuation of Marshall’s Rhythm Mastr comic series.

Marshall’s project aims to amplify and extend the references of African-American culture into a range of media, while introducing the possibility of multiple readings and interpretations of the imagery and the concept of Black aesthetics. In addition, he seeks to raise intriguing and often confounding questions about the role of the artist and the institution in defining positions in artistic practice. His subtitle, Mediations on Black Aesthetics, makes reference to a tradition of didacticism that exists within African-American culture, yet paradoxically the way in which his works communicate meaning will be consciously ambiguous. The Chicago presentation of the exhibition will also include the participation of three additional artists: Damon Lamar Reed, Senga Nengudi, and Leonardo (L’Eduardo) Aliaga.

Major support for the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in honor of Bette and Neison Harris.

Additional support is provided by The Joyce Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Peter Norton Family Foundation, and The Boeing Company.

Air transportation is provided by American Airlines, the official airline of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Travel Schedule - After its run at the MCA, the exhibition will travel to the Miami Art Museum (February 6-April 25, 2004), the Baltimore Museum of Art (June 20-September 5, 2004), and the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama (February 3-April 24, 2005). An additional venue in New York has not yet been confirmed.

Catalogue - Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics (104 pages; $29.95, $26.95 for members) includes full-color illustrations of the works in the exhibition; an introduction by exhibition curator Elizabeth Smith; essays by curators Helen Molesworth and David Moos, philosophy scholar Charles Mills, artist Jeff Donaldson, and journalist Nathaniel McClin; and a section describing Marshall’s process and source materials. Produced in close partnership with Marshall, this book further develops the exhibition’s questions about the role of the artist and the development of Black aesthetics.

About the Artist - Kerry James 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 was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1985. He was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation award in 1997, and his work has been featured at Documenta 10, the Whitney Biennial (1997), and the 2000 Carnegie International. Since 1993 he has been a professor at the School of Art and Design, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work is included in the collections at the MCA, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Los Angeles County Museum. He is married to the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce.

About the Curator - Elizabeth Smith is James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the MCA, where she oversees the MCA’s collection and exhibition program. Since her arrival in 1999 she has curated such exhibitions as Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain, as well as Donald Moffett: What Barbara Jordan Wore; Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940’s, Katharina Fritsch, and At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture. She is curating the forthcoming exhibition Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective. In 2000 she guest-curated the exhibition The Architecture of R.M. Schindler for MOCA, Los Angeles, which was named "Best Architecture or Design Exhibition of the Year" by the American section of the International Association of Art Critics. Educated in art history at Columbia University, Smith was Adjunct Professor in the Public Art Studies Program at the University of Southern California’s School of Fine Arts from 1992-98. She has published Techno Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2000) and Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program 1945-66 (Taschen Verlag, 2002). This exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Smith with Tricia Van Eck, MCA curatorial coordinator.