In 1978 Marshall graduates from the Otis Art Institute in Chicago. That also marks the year he starts making collages. He puts drawing aside to work on a series of semi-abstract collages where he discovers and explores the possibilities of planes, composition and color. Some of these early collages contain references to Black cultural history, while others register a sort of naive dissatisfaction with the way of the world. In Yellow Quarters (1979) these elements are interwoven with his own personal history. For this, Marshall undertook genealogical research that he reworks into an eponymous collage: “I went back to Birmingham to interview my grandmother and compile all these stories I heard my mother and my aunt tell me, and this eventually resulted in a collage titled Yellow Quarters, the subject of which was my maternal grandfather’s murder in a place in Birmingham called Yellow Quarters.”