A Tuesday pick-me-up courtesy of American artist Kerry James Marshall, whose powerful paintings are devoted to exploring “African-American life and history”. Marshall describes this magical work as a key turning point in his career for its successful combination of folk painting convention (in this case “symbolic representations of the seven African powers from the Yoruba pantheon, and some ve-ve from Haitian Voodun”) with Western modes of pictorial representation—a purposeful challenge to the art historical canon and its erasure of black aesthetic traditions.
