In 1997, African American artist Kerry James Marshall painted Past Times, an artwork depicting a black family in high-class leisure – playing golf, playing cricket, as well as water skiing and driving a motorboat across a lake. It’s a take on a pastoral scene typically filled with European aristocratic types yet instead filled with black figures.
Last week at Sotheby’s, it sold for $21.1m, breaking a new world record, making Marshall, according to reports, the highest-paid African American artist.
“My ambition was never to make a lot of money,” the Chicago-based artist told the Guardian in 2017. “I was really just struggling to make the best pictures I could make.”
The buyer of Marshall’s painting was Sean Combs, AKA Diddy, the founder of Bad Boy Entertainment and Harlem rapper who, in the same year this painting was made, debuted his album No Way Out at number one on the Billboard chart.
Jack Shainman, Marshall’s gallerist, said Combs was the right art collector “with purpose and an eye toward preserving legacy”.
Marshall has always felt like he had a social responsibility, growing up in South Central Los Angeles during the peak of the civil rights battle. Having lived near the headquarters of the Black Panthers, his art reflects the reality of many working-class African Americans, painting scenes of his neighborhood community, housing projects to boisterous group gatherings and intimate moments that range from romantic interludes to pensive solitude.
Over his 40-year career, Marshall has exhibited at the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art and counts Michelle Obama as a fan. One of his prime motivations has always been to work against the whitewashing of art history. “If no one is out there working to produce paintings with a racially different set of figures, non-white people will always be in trouble,” he said in 2016. “That is why I keep making pictures that aim to make their way into museums.”
However, with ongoing police brutality as well as a string of recent, publicised incidents of racial discrimination, such as two black men arrested for sitting in a Starbucks in Philadelphia, Marshall’s work feels especially relevant now.
“His deep exploration of black identity and visibility, especially at a moment when black people are under assault for getting coffee, golfing, napping, barbecuing and shopping, is relevant,” said Steven Nelson, the director of the Africa Studies Center at the University of California. “His work takes its cues from the history of western painting and expands how we can conceive of figurative painting.”
Marshall has been a major artist for decades, but his career trajectory has come into the spotlight following retrospectives in 2004 and 2016. “Aligned with a decade of Marshall’s growing prominence and the fanfare surrounding his recent retrospective, it’s not surprising to see this painting break records at auction,” said Nelson.
To Nyugen Smith, an artist based in Jersey City, this art sale signifies something that has been brewing all along. “All of his work has positioned him to receive the acclaim that he is receiving at this moment, just as black people have been fighting against racism and injustice while affirming our self-worth since we were brought to the Americas,” said Smith. “This work affirms our humanity and it celebrates our history, culture, ideas, beauty, our genius, our natural mystic and legacy.”
While the price tag is putting the artist in the spotlight, it’s a byproduct of what’s really important for this historic moment. “If market value is a sign of worth – admiration, appreciation for artistry, skill, imagination, creativity – this development is good,” said Jacqueline Francis, author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America. “It’s good for painting as a practice, and it’s also an opportunity to explain Marshall’s work to the public because it needs it; I’ll do cartwheels when as many people, black people, are talking about this painting as [Childish Gambino’s] This is America.”
The artist’s trajectory is hope for elder artists, too, as Marshall is now a 62-year-old art star in an industry that is obsessed with young stars, or the Jean-Michel Basquiat fetish. “The interest in Marshall’s work has greater relevance today, as museums expand the traditional canons of art history to embrace a more diverse approach,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which owns an early work by Marshall. “Personally, I have enjoyed witnessing how the attention to a contemporary artist like Kerry James Marshall has opened the door to fresh consideration of older artists.”
While Past Times will be put in Combs’ private collection, it’s paramount that Marshall continues to have a major presence in museums around the world.
After all, being on public display is all part of the artist’s mission. “When most people go to a big museum like the Louvre, it reaffirms their idea of what real art is supposed to look like,” Marshall told the Guardian. “If you don’t see black people in those pictures, then you don’t think black people belong in those kind of pictures … people need to start thinking that these pictures belong in those places, too.”