Kerry James Marshall
Dailies, 1999-2000
Dailies is a serial comic-strip that Marshall has produced over numerous years, that are presented in their entirety here for the first time. The series exists as a series of prints on newsprint paper and a new set of light-boxes.
The strip tells interwoven stories of a group of teenagers in an African-American inner-city neighborhood where lawlessness has reached extreme levels. When superhuman intervention is called for, a protagonist named Rythm Mastr steps up to teach the young heroes how to unlock the secret powers of a series of traditional African sculptures.
The Dailies can be seen as the synthesis of many of the ideas, artefacts, realities and concepts that constantly recur in Marshall's work: the everyday, black pride, beauty, economic disadvantage, societal invisibility, as well as African and African-American folk art traditions positioned in direct relation to the hierarchies of Western art history and contemporary mass media. The prints and light-boxes are proportionate in scale to newspaper spreads.