Thelma Bruce has lived in the same house since 1953. When she first moved there, Park Manor was predominantly white. For many years blacks took a risk moving south of Bronzeville. “But I don’t feel we took any chances, really,” she says. “A few black families were already here when we came, and we had no problems. This was always a nice neighborhood.”
Marshall has been getting a lot of attention lately, but he seems unaffected in both his art and demeanor by his new celebrity. A professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1993, and the recent recipient of a $260,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, he works in the same small South Loop studio he first rented in 1991. Paintings from his “Garden Projects” series–dreamy, almost Edenic views of public housing projects–have been shown at the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art. He’s been included in both the Whitney Biennial survey of recent American art and the Documenta international art event in Kassel, Germany. His dealers in New York and Los Angeles have waiting lists to purchase his paintings, but Marshall works slowly and is unlikely to add a Chicago gallery because, he says, “I don’t do enough work.” But three examples from his recent “Souvenir” series, as well as a variety of his work in other media–“some sculpture, some video, some photographs”–are currently on view at the Renaissance Society, where he’ll speak about his work this Sunday at 5. It’s Marshall’s first one-person show in Chicago.
A native of East Saint Louis, Bruce moved to Chicago when she was 17 to study nursing, completing her coursework at Northwestern in 1946. There were few blacks at the school, and she felt a bit out of place. “I don’t think there were more than six of us,” she says. Much later, in the 1970s, she traveled to Africa with Lois Ricks. They went to Goree, an island off the coast of Senegal that was a major transit point for the slave trade with the Americas (President Clinton stopped there in April). Bruce says she experienced a flood of feelings, not the least of them anger. Amazed and fascinated by the culture, she bought the two wooden heads that can be seen in Marshall’s painting. Reflecting today, she says that trip instilled a new pride in her identity.
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Ricks says her living room replicates the one in her previous home. While she has always bought “way more books than art,” she started collecting artwork in 1955, when she purchased a watercolor by someone she met at an art fair. She added pieces to her collection on trips to Africa, beginning in 1973. African-American music has also been important to Ricks, and she feels an “uncanny” connection to the musicians Marshall refers to in his picture. Her late husband was an audiophile who took up cabinetmaking to assemble his own speakers. “We had this woofer that was too big for that little apartment, and it would be blasting away during the 50s. And the beginnings of black consciousness started us thinking more in terms of culture and in terms of who we were, and that was probably very much reflected in my collections.” Ricks mentions jazz, and the music of Sun Ra and Phil Cohran. She still has her records, but Marshall hasn’t seen them; they’re stored behind a chair.
“Many of us might feel that Kerry’s portraiture is stereotypical, but I love him because I know his focus, and I see it in his art,” she says. “He was a child during the civil rights movement; he didn’t have that firsthand experience, and his art probably reflects that. I think there are things that I’m saying that he doesn’t quite agree with. I’m too dogmatic in my opinions about our condition; most young people don’t hold my ideas. If I had to say I’m anything it would be an African nationalist. But I’m also born-again bourgeois. You live in America–what can you do? We blacks have been set up to be considered the enemy, but there should be no differences among us. Racism keeps you focused on the wrong things.”
Marshall says he’s known he wanted to be an artist since kindergarten. “My teacher kept a scrapbook. She had clipped pictures from magazines, newspaper clippings, old Christmas cards and Valentine cards, ads from magazines, reproductions of paintings, puzzles. And she would let the kid who was the best behaved look at the scrapbook while everybody else took their nap after recess. Looking at that scrapbook really did change everything for me. It seemed so magical, all these different images, all these different styles, what they seemed to suggest. There were a lot of mysterious things–pictures of lions and giraffes–that you just don’t see out on your block. They seemed to promise this amazing other world in which everything looked interesting. I literally was overwhelmed by it. I remember saying, ‘That’s what I want to do–I want to make pictures like those.’”
wasn’t making but a dollar and something an hour at the hospital; faced with the limitations of Birmingham, there didn’t seem to be a lot of options. My mother’s youngest sister moved to LA before we did. Her husband, I think, worked for Ford; she ended up being head of housekeeping at Englewood Park Hospital. My father had gone ahead till he found a job”–at another VA hospital, but making more money.
