CLOSE LOOK: Kerry James Marshall

Sanman Studios is hosting a session on Kerry James Marshall on Thursday, October 15, starting at 6:30 PM. It's the first installment of CLOSE LOOK, a visual literacy program that pairs specific artworks with guided conversation to open up a painting to the people looking at it. The whole point is to slow down and really see what's in front of you rather than just glancing past.

This particular session centers on Marshall's 2016 retrospective, Mastry, which was both a major exhibition and a published volume. Marshall is known for his large-scale paintings that place Black figures in classical European compositions, and Mastry brought a huge chunk of that career together in one place. The conversation will draw from that retrospective, so the session works as a way to walk through his approach and the themes he's spent decades revisiting.

If you're not already familiar with his work, Marshall's paintings are hard to miss. He works with a deep, saturated black that gives his figures a physical presence, and he often plays with the history of Western art—the portraits, the landscapes, the formal arrangements—and populates them with Black subjects who aren't just filling a gap, but are the center of the frame. Mastry was a comprehensive look at how he's built that world over time, and this session uses it as the starting point for the discussion.

It's a guided conversation, not a lecture, so you're encouraged to talk through the work as it's being looked at. If you've ever stood in front of a painting and wondered how to actually start talking about what you're seeing, that's exactly what CLOSE LOOK is for. It's the first volume of the program, so it's a good place to jump in. The session is at Sanman Studios in Houston on Thursday, October 15, at 6:30 PM.