BAIA BITS: Charles White’s Influence On Kerry James Marshall

Little Moments Where Knowledge Meets Art

Art is knowledge, knowledge is art. Just ask internationally acclaimed artist Kerry James Marshall who, as a fifth grader in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles, came across a book that would forever change his life. It was Negro History Week, and a report on a historical figure of his choice was due by week’s end. Entitled Great Negroes, Past and Present, the young Marshall—already interested in art—browsed through its more familiar images of Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and numerous others before reaching the back of the book, reserved for visual artists. There, he was first struck by the name and work of the iconic Charles White, not because of the beauty of his art but, as he penned in his 2018 essay on his late mentor, because the “simple contradiction of a black man named White in a book about ‘negroes’ struck me as ironic.”

Heroes: Gone But Not Forgotten – The Art Of Charles White (2014) exhibition at the David C. Driskell Center. Photo: Najee Dorsey

Irony morphed into serendipity as a series of seemingly preordained events would place Marshall in the same spaces as White. The artistic teen was selected for a summer drawing class at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County where White taught, despite being reserved for older students. Though White didn’t teach the course, Marshall was exposed to the book Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White and permitted to visit the renowned artist’s studio on campus. Following Leonardo da Vinci’s timeless advice for young artists to locate a “good master and copy his work,” Marshall “was copying a drawing of Frederick Douglass from the book when the artist himself walked into our classroom.” Right there, he later wrote, “I resolved to be an Otis student as soon as I graduated high school.” 

In January 1977, Marshall enrolled as a full-time student at Otis. And even though his iconic mentor would pass two years later, the impact on Marshall was indelible, stretching beyond the grave. A quarter century after the young artist first read White’s name, he bought an abandoned building to convert into a studio in White’s native city of Chicago. There, wrote Marshall, sitting “atop a pile of papers in a desk drawer left behind by the previous owners” was a copy of the book that started it all, Great Negroes, Past and Present, “worn and tattered, held together with duct tape. My eyes popped and my heart pounded just as they had at his studio door at Otis. Just thinking about that moment sends a shiver through my body.”

Heroes: Gone But Not Forgotten – The Art Of Charles White (2014) exhibition at the David C. Driskell Center. Photo: Najee Dorsey

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Stephanie Robinson, Esq. is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a national media figure, author, former Chief Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and former President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focusing on democracy.  Ms. Robinson hosted her own national radio show, Roundtable with Stephanie Robinson, a popular weekly 30-minute, talk-radio program focused on culture, politics, and relationships that aired on TSN.  For over half a decade, Ms. Robinson was Political and Social Commentator for the Tom Joyner Morning Show where she spoke to between 9 and 10 million people weekly, offering her perspective on the day’s most pressing social and political issues.

Robinson is co-author of Accountable: Making America as Good as Its Promise, (Atria Books, 2009). She is a nationally recognized expert on issues relating to social policy, women, race, family, and electoral politics.  She was featured as one of the 30 Young Leaders of the Future in Ebony Magazine and was profiled in the book As I Am: Young African American Women in a Critical Age, by Julian Okwu.  Robinson is a frequent speaker expressing her views in countless media outlets including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, C-Span, Fox News, NewsOne and NPR.

Stephanie was a Member of President Clinton’s first Mission to Africa regarding children orphaned by AIDS. Robinson, a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland and the Harvard Law School, is a native of Steubenville, Ohio. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

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