"There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art, because they can see the power of art. Art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise. It is art that conveys feelings."

 - Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine 

Kerry James Marshall

(c)image: Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, and Koplin Del Rio, CA
Dailies, 1999-2000
Mixed Media , variable dimensions
12 lightboxes - 22 framed silkscreen prints

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.