Black and Part Black Birds in America: (Pigeon and Black Capped Chickadee no 2)

Against a light blue sky, a large rock pigeon stands on a yellow platform built around the narrow trunk of a climbing rose tree. The pigeon, its orange left eye bright against its black head and jewel-toned neck, gazes out at the viewer. Above the large bird, a smaller black-capped chickadee takes flight across the branches, moving down the canvas past the pigeon. Surrounded by lush pink roses in full bloom and glossy green leaves, the two birds seem at odds with their environment and with each other.

Black and Part Black Birds in America (Pigeon and Black Capped Chickadee no 2), painted in 2021, is part of an ongoing series of seven paintings of birds by Marshall made between 2020 and 2023 that are inspired by the work of ornithologist and artist John James Audubon (American, born Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, 1785–1851). Audubon created The Birds of America, a portfolio of 435 life-sized prints of the birds of North America published between 1827 and 1838. The Birds of America shows different species of North American birds in an abbreviated sample of their natural habitat and is widely regarded as an important contribution to both art history and ecological studies. Marshall has been fascinated by Audubon's work since he saw it in the landmark 1976 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750–1950, organized by artist and curator David C. Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In his artistic practice, Marshall draws on his extensive knowledge of art history to create what he calls a “counter-archive” of figurative art that both acknowledges the omission of Black figures in Western art history and addresses it by placing such figures at the center of the narrative. Throughout his body of work, birds are plentiful, flying or perched in trees or holding banners aloft. By making birds the focus of this recent series and reimagining Audubon’s Birds of America through his Black and Part Black Birds in America paintings, Marshall layers his view of history—as he has said, “part fact, part fiction, part fantasy”—into the natural world.

Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (organizer). Venue: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, March 10–July 28, 2024 [exhibition catalogue].

Schjeldahl, Peter. “Kerry James Marshall's America.” New Yorker, November 7, 2016.

Loos, Ted. “Kerry James Marshall’s Black Birds Take Flight in a New Series.” New York Times, July 29, 2020, sec. C, p. 1.

Ebert, Grace. “Chromatic Black Crows by Artist Kerry James Marshall Consider the Precarity of Race in America." Colossal, August 17, 2020.

Ortiz, Maria Elena. Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940. Fort Worth, TX: ‎DelMonico Books/Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2024. Illustrated, p. 111.