Drawing inspiration from Langston Hughes’s influential 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Kerry James Marshall recalls the essay’s famous introduction, in which Hughes describes the struggle of a fellow African American writer. “I don’t want to be a black poet, I just want to be a poet,” Hughes wrote, referring to the inherent burden of race on a young writer’s identity.

The artwork of Kerry James Marshall investigates and reclaims the essence of blackness. Through the oversaturation of his figures’ skin tones to near pitch-blackness, Marshall challenges American culture’s needless fear of darkness. “In his essay, he says what that the artist is really saying is that ‘I want to be a white artist. Because they aren’t burdened by the problem of race,’” says Marshall, accompanied by his Black Romantic series installed at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. “So who needs to not know, or who needs to not think of you as a Black artist, in order for you to become a real artist?” Marshall asks.