Photo © Kendall Karmanian
It’s a sunny weekday afternoon in April, and Kerry James Marshall is showing me around his lived-in studio on a quaint residential stretch of Chicago’s South Side, taking a break from fine-tuning a handful of canvases. The artist — who is renowned for his painted musings on art-historical oversights and for taking on the African American experience as both subject and cause — is an affable presence in person. He is sweet, confident, convivial, and eager to discuss the ways in which he’s approaching an ambitious new body of work.
