Conference paper delivered at Black Portraiture[s] III: Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Nov. 17-19, 2016.

This paper examines American artist Kerry James Marshall’s series Rythm Mastr (1999-present), an ongoing project featuring the black superheroes that Marshall never saw in the comics he read growing up. While better known for his large-scale, colorful canvases of hyperblack figures in commonplace settings, Marshall (b.1955) has long been fixated on this project, which began as an installation for the 1999 Carnegie International and has expanded to encompass lightboxes, video, drawings, prints, and–the artist hopes–a feature-length animated film. Populated by superheroes whose powers derive from those attributed to the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon, and characters that debate intellectual history, philosophy, and politics in Black vernacular English, Rythm Mastr channels the diasporic and utopian drive of science fiction and Afrofuturism using the intertextual qualities of the graphic novel and the film storyboard. A space of fantasy created out of extensive aerial mapping of Marshall’s Bronzeville neighborhood in South Side Chicago, Rythm Mastr offers up an alternative reality based in real space. Examining the role that African art and culture plays in the genesis of Rythm Mastr’s main storylines–particularly as a gateway to this alternative reality–this paper posits Marshall’s project as a revisionist history in graphic form that offers a world of possibilities outside of the commonly accepted narrative constructed around African art and modernism and its institutional legacy. By speaking to both popular culture and intellectual history, the ordinary and the fantastic, the constraints of the real and the opportunities of speculative fiction, Rythm Mastr generates the extraordinary out of the everyday in a way that powerfully advances Marshall’s larger project as a site of engagement with art history.

Black Portraiture[s] III: Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures is the seventh international conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body. The conference is co-sponsored and held in collaboration with U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard and the U.S. Embassy Pretoria; the Goodman Gallery; along with our co-sponsors, the conference is also supported by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Harvard University; and New York University’s Vice Provost for Faculty, Arts, Humanities and Diversities, LaPietra Dialogues, Tisch School of the Arts Department of Photography & Imaging, the Dean’s Office, and NYU’s Institute of African American Affairs.

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