Kerry James Marshall - Better Homes Better Gardens - Essay Example

The essay "Kerry James Marshall - Better Homes Better Gardens" explores the Better Homes Better Gardens by Kerry James Marshall. The African-American artist Kerry James Marshall has worked to include his own experience and background into his paintings in such a way that they work to provide a meaningful background to his subjects, adding subtleties of meaning to the overall work that helps to portray his idea of what the painting is attempting to say. Unlike Dali, however, the background meanings of many of Marshall’s paintings are easier to decipher, perhaps because they are drawn from such a broadly experienced background as the civil rights movements of the 1950s and the Watts riots and other cultural issues that hit the streets of Los Angeles in the 1960s.

By understanding the social, cultural and political background from which Marshall is pulling as well as the way in which he combines a variety of mediums and inspirations to present a finished project that speaks volumes about its subject in every inch of his canvas, it is possible to analyze a painting such as “Better Homes, Better Gardens” in such a way as to approximate what Marshall himself was trying to express in his selections of color, form, subject and imagery. Kerry James Marshall was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.

This was the year of the bus boycott in Alabama, that launched Martin Luther King as a significant leader of the civil rights movement and that saw a great deal of violence in the city streetsю