Kerry James Marshall
(c)image: Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, and Koplin Del Rio, CA
The title of the series of collages At the End of the Wee Hours (1984-86) refers to the refrain of the poem Notebook of a Return to my Native Land (1939) by Aimé Césaire.
In reading the poem, Marshall discovered how politics and poetry could be woven into a magical prose. A Martinique native, Césaire (1913 – 2008) was one of the most important spokesmen for anti-colonialism for nearly 75 years, in French-speaking lands and beyond. While his poetry searched for a fitting voice for an indigenous Martiniquan identity, his political pamphlets and activism helped give real voice and traction to the anticolonial movement. Also referencing the pictorial logic of Cubism in these collages, Marshall tries to evoke the feeling of the poem's tropes in a semi-abstract form. Snippets of different landscapes are brought together into a single image, which in turn seems to form a new landscape.