Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum

"Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum" is an important painting in Kerry James Marshall’s career and features motifs that have come to define his larger body of work. It is one of the earliest examples of Marshall’s signature “invisible man,” a portrait in which he uses slightly different shades of black to depict a human figure. This practice emerged from his investigation into the relative invisibility of Black people in society and art history, and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall confronts such racial stereotypes with his emphatically “black-on-black” self-portrait, seen hanging in the center of the wall. The vacuum directly below alludes to the void within which Black artists have sometimes found themselves working. Building on references as varied as Renaissance painting and folk art, Marshall often simplifies his interior spaces. Here, the lack of shading and sharply slanting lines of the floorboards flatten the room, creating an intimate, close-up experience of a domestic space.