Slow Dance

Kerry James Marshall probes the complexities of African-American experience in sophisticated works that range in mood from deeply humanistic to exquisitely caustic. Slow Dance shows Marshall at his early best, just as he had synthesized his distinctive painting style, combining a precisely calibrated mix of art-historical and vernacular modes. In this visually complex painting, a quietly embracing couple occupies the center of an image filled with color, pattern, light, and music. The domestic space is adorned with middle-class accoutrements—couch, stereo, flowers—as well as objects that evoke facets of diasporic black culture—the African mask, the braided rug, the remains of a dinner on a table adorned with symbols of Santeria (a religion originating in West Africa and the Caribbean). The couch recedes in classic perspective while other elements, such as the rug with its gravity-pulled drips of paint, seem to slide out of the painting. Marshall deploys these formal stratagems to create a mildly unsettling space full of layered visual styles and cultural referents that whirl around the still, slow dance in the center.