The art of the possible
One recent afternoon in the fourth-floor gallery of the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, a young girl paused near a massive color woodcut by Chicago-based artist Kerry James Marshall. As she gazed at “Untitled,” his 50-foot-long series of 12 large panels, several of which depict six African-American men relaxing in a living room after a meal, the girl said to her mother, “That looks like the president.” “Perhaps such a statement suggests that expectations are shifting,” said Susan Dackerman, Harvard’s Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, who recounted the child’s comments during a discussion with Marshall on Thursday at the museum. Marshall said those shifting expectations reflect not only a change in the notion of who can hold the nation’s highest office, but who can create and be the subject of fine art. Marshall’s work is informed by his deep appreciation for the history of artistic expression, and profoundly influenced by urban...