As it is used in line 49, the word conventions most nearly means: 34 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-H11 3 3 Passage III HUMANITIES: Passage A is from the article “This Modern Master Spent His Life Bringing Black Faces to Classic Art” by Sam Worley. Passage B is from the article “In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall” by Karen Wilkin. Passage A by Sam Worley Kerry James Marshall knew he wanted to be an artist, but he didn’t know what kind. After graduating from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he tried some social realist stuff. He tried collage. He tried abstraction. But none of it fit. “I hadn’t quite figured out what my interest in making art was supposed to be,” he says. “Except I really wanted to do it.” So, at 25, he decided to return to the basics and paint a self-portrait—a classic portrait, almost. Its title alluded to a great literary work: Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. Marshall used egg tem- pera, a 13th-century favorite. He adopted compositional techniques associated with artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael. But, of course, his subject was black. So black that the shade of his skin is deeper than the portrait’s black background, which he fades into, as if invisible. Compared with con- ventional European portraiture, it’s like a photo nega- tive. “This is where I first started to figure out you can use all that information, all that knowledge, you can use that technique, you can use this medium, but it doesn’t have to look like any of the things that you say it’s intellectually based on.” And so Marshall settled on creating a body of work inspired by and in dialogue with the classics—his early barbershop portrait De Style, for example, its name a sly play on the Dutch abstract art movement de Stijl—while remaining resolutely its own thing. He found success with a simple insistence on placing black people, and black history, at the center of his raucous, colorful paintings, and that has opened a space for younger artists. One Marshall disciple, Kehinde Wiley, the star 39-year-old New York artist whose huge canvases show black people in the heroic postures favored by the old masters, has said that when, as a child, he walked into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting, its black subjects high- lighted nothing so much as their absence elsewhere in the museum. In a certain sense, young Kehinde Wileys have always been Marshall’s target audience. “If I have any- thing to do with it, you’ll always be able to encounter a picture that has a black person in it that’s also made by a black person,” says Marshall. Passage B by Karen Wilkin Painter Kerry James Marshall, born in Birming- ham, Alabama, and raised in Watts, Los Angeles, lives and works in Chicago. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, among other prestigious awards, and has exhibited in major institutions in the U.S. and Europe. His work figures in important museum and private collections, including a permanent installation, completed in 2008, in the lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—vast frescoes of George Washington at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Yet the Tower installation at the National Gallery of Art in 2013 was his first one-person exhibition in Washington. The selection in the Tower presents Marshall to us as a modern day History Painter—a creator of large- scale, often complex narrative images that are packed with references and populated by eloquent figures. The leading lights of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art establishment deemed History Painting to be the most high-minded and important of approaches—a con- ception of what painting could be that was attainable only by the most ambitious, gifted artists. It is instantly clear that Marshall lacks neither ambition nor talent nor, in fact, high-mindedness of a certain kind. But unlike his distinguished (and often dogmatic) predeces- sors—who concentrated on scenes from ancient history, mythology, and the Bible, presented with a mix of archaeological accuracy and polite generalization—he does not restrict himself to imaginary visions of a remote, idealized past. Quite the contrary: His unruly, discomfiting images fuse a commonplace, imperfect American pres- ent with palpable echoes of an even more imperfect American past, all of it highlighting specifically African-American experience and all of it served up in a rich, materially expressive language of intensely hued paint, extravagant mark-making, collage, and, occa- sionally, glitter. Fleeting allusions to the highest of high art of both the distant and recent past share the canvas with present-day, vernacular, sometimes slightly ham-fisted imagery, as well as African symbols and emblems of African deities. Rather than cancelling each other out, these unlikely bedfellows somehow reinforce each other. Passage A: Copyrighted 2016. Tribune Publishing. 126609:1216SH. Passage B: Karen Wilkin, from “In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall,” New Criterion, October 2013. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 35 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-H11 3 3 21. Which of the following events mentioned in Passage A occurred first chronologically? lage, and abstraction. of His Former Self.
