Painter Kerry James Marshall talks process

A good, non-wonky art and process discussion with painter Kerry James Marshall. Marshall's retrospective "Mastry" is a must-see if you're in Southern California, at MOCA Grand Avenue through July 3.

The now nearly 600 year history of painting contains remarkably few African American painters and even fewer representations of black people. Marshall, a child of the civil rights era, set out to redress this absence. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters,” Marshall has said, “and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go.”