This was one of the first pieces of Kerry James Marshall that I saw live in a museum. I loved it and could not wait to show it to anyone who would come with me. Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) (2003) There are a million little stories in buttons and memorabilia across this work. They each tell a story of a history of a people.

Kerry James Marshall describes Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) as “the shape of Africa reconfigured as a cubist sculpture.” Reversing art-historical narratives of modernist painting’s appropriation of African sculpture, it offers a complex meditation on African ancestry and black aesthetics. Africa Restored formally references the nkisi nkondi, or power figures, of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These sculptures were crafted as basic armatures into which accretions of metals, mirrors, and nails were driven to activate their force. (Art Institute of Chicago)

“While the tonal values of Marshall’s figures are universal, their impressions are extremely varied— Marshall’s figures assume all facets of black life. Marshall’s 2012 painting, School of Beauty, School of Culture portrays a scene inspired by the cosmetology school “Your School of Beauty Culture” located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. The world defined in Marshall’s painting designates a space in which black women determine their own images of ideal beauty. With a nod to Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors, Marshall uses the anamorphic Sleeping Beauty head to register Euro-centric standards of beauty, populated in the academy for centuries, as a distorted reality. “