Art: Ain’t I a Muse? Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled and the Art of Flipping the Script

Somewhere between the Renaissance and Real Housewives, Western art history forgot to color in the lines—specifically, the ones involving Black people. Enter Kerry James Marshall, rolling into the canon like a wrecking ball dipped in intellect and irony, armed with nothing but a paintbrush and 500 years of receipts.

His 2009 piece, Untitled, is not just a portrait. It’s a righteous sucker punch to the dusty old playbook of art history, the one where everyone worth painting apparently had to be alabaster, listless, and suspiciously fond of fruit bowls. Instead, Marshall gives us a woman: strong, enigmatic, fabulously coiffed, and unapologetically Black—drenched in ink so rich it looks like it might drip wisdom on your shoes if you stare too long.

Rendered in monochrome washes, this woman is not demure. She’s not background. She’s the damn subject. She’s high fashion, high drama, high concept—and possibly high-key judging you for not noticing the brush in her hand, which might be metaphor or might just be literal, because Marshall loves a good double entendre. Is she painting herself into being? Is she poking at the viewer’s assumptions about art, race, and whose stories get to be told with dignity? The answer is yes. Always yes.

Kerry James Marshall, born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama—yes, that Birmingham—grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. You know, the one they like to whitewash into “peaceful marches” while skipping over the firehoses and state-sanctioned violence. He studied fine art, mastered its techniques, and then politely (or maybe not-so-politely) used them to drag the entire field through a very necessary reckoning. His mission? Make Blackness visible—not in the tragic, tokenized, or trauma-porn way that so many galleries love—but as epic, everyday, and absolutely central.

So what’s the deal with Untitled? Why the mystery? Because sometimes the best art doesn’t spoon-feed you. It holds up a mirror and makes you squirm—especially if your idea of portraiture stops at Vermeer’s milkmaid. This woman might be a queen, a siren, a teacher, a mother, or the artist himself in drag (don’t rule it out). But she is. She exists in fullness, in opacity, in glamour, and in the defiantly uncaptioned confidence of being more than a label. She’s the Mona Lisa’s cooler, more politically aware cousin who definitely doesn’t have time for your “Where are you really from?” questions.

Marshall’s whole career is an intervention. And this piece? It’s a visual side-eye to anyone who ever thought Blackness had to be footnoted or exceptionalized to matter.

So here’s the question:

What would the history of art look like if this woman had always been the standard?

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Art: This Is Not Your Ancestor’s Portrait Gallery

There’s a young man in a painting. His head is shorn. His eyes don’t blink. His jaw is so sharp it could shave marble. And behind him? A riot of green leaves—ivy or acanthus or kudzu or maybe wallpaper stolen from an 18th-century Versailles powder room and then weaponized for maximum contrast.

His name is Jarrett. At least, for now. Because in Kehinde Wiley’s world, names are temporary but power is permanent.

Let’s get something straight. Jarrett (Study) isn’t a sketch. It’s a warning shot. It’s a side-eye to five centuries of European art history, politely suggesting that Caravaggio might need to move over and let someone else sit at the visual table. This is Wiley mid-incantation: summoning gods not from Olympus or Florence but from Harlem, Dakar, and South Central L.A.—cloaked not in togas, but in camo jackets, hoodies, and the lingering residue of hip hop, colonialism, and street hustle.

Kehinde Wiley doesn’t paint people. He anoints them.

And in Jarrett (Study), he’s baptizing his subject in oil paint and defiance.

Wiley’s whole project is to take the language of empire—those swooning oils, those silk-lined doublets, those smug aristocrats riding horses too big for their legacy—and remix it like a DJ who’s finally tired of playing Mozart for a crowd that’s never heard Dilla. His sitters don’t apologize. They don’t plead. They don’t thank you for your gaze. They meet it. They dare it.

In this portrait, Jarrett is not performing for the viewer. He isn’t smiling. He isn’t demure. He isn’t posing for a job interview at the Gates Foundation. He is the job. He is the foundation. He is the embodiment of a visual reparations package centuries overdue.

And that background? Don’t get it twisted. It’s not just pretty. Those leaf patterns are Wiley’s visual landmines—ornate, seductive, and absolutely subversive. They’re the art equivalent of a Beyoncé beat hiding a protest anthem. Sure, they look decorative, but they serve the same function as gold leaf in a medieval altarpiece: they frame a saint. A prophet. A Black body too often cropped out of the canon.

Wiley once said, “I am painting Black men in poses once reserved for kings.”

That’s not metaphor. That’s strategy.

And so, Jarrett (Study) isn’t just a portrait. It’s a power move in slow motion. A corrective to centuries of portraiture that treated Black bodies as props, afterthoughts, or—when the art world was feeling extra racist—absences.

So here’s the real question:

If your museum walls were your history textbooks, would you even exist in the story?

Wiley makes sure the answer is yes. And he does it with maximalist wallpaper, baroque rebellion, and subjects who look like they’ve already seen the future—and it’s wearing Air Jordans.

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