Racial unity art skin#

The purpose was to combat racism by focusing attention on racial prejudice. It started in 1957 in the United States by the Bah’ National Spiritual Assembly. But if you are always standing on the sideline as witness to other people achieving great things, then ultimately that has a damaging psychological effect because it undermines your sense of self-worth. Race Unity Day, which is also known as Race Amity Day, is observed annually on the second Sunday of June. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic. “For black people,” he says, “everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. But Marshall believes that there is still much work to be done.

Of course, in recent decades, many black artists have enjoyed enormous success, from Jean-Michel Basquiat in the ‘80s to Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Steve McQueen today. But he does lament the fact that black artists still have to negotiate a predominantly white art world. There is no rancour in Marshall’s voice when he says this: rather, it is obvious that he loves art history and hopes to emulate the Old Masters, not raze them to the ground. Black figures were never the central subjects in art-history books.” Then I started noticing the same thing everywhere else. “When they did introduce the Black Panther in Fantastic Four, I became acutely aware that the black superhero was a strange phenomenon – an exception to the rule. “There were no black superheroes,” he recalls. Marshall, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in the South Central area of Los Angeles, first became aware of the invisibility of black people within what he calls “the visual field” not by visiting museums but by reading comic books. “Those are the two primary forms of representation,” says Marshall, “although you might also see images of black people in the process of being conquered.” Other than that, though, black people usually appear in Western art as peripheral servants: the Moorish page to the left of Van Dyck’s 1634 portrait of Princess Henrietta of Lorraine or the woman bearing flowers in the background of Manet’s famous nude Olympia (1863) are both typical of this trend.

Western artists often cast a black figure as one of the magi when painting the stock scene of the Adoration of the Kings ( Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance altarpiece on this theme in the National Gallery in London is a good example). In part this is the legacy of the way that they were traditionally presented within art history. It feels sad to write this in 2014, but seeing black people represented in paintings in this fashion remains unusual. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. “They are a response to the tendency in the culture to privilege lightness. “The blackness of my figures is supposed to be unequivocal, absolute and unmediated,” Marshall explains.

Racial unity art skin#

Not only that, but their skin tone is strikingly uniform: ebony-dark, with an attractive, satiny sheen.