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Untitled (Handsome Young Man)

Artist Kerry James Marshall (American, born 1955)
Title Untitled (Handsome Young Man)
Date 2010
Medium Etching and aquatint on paper
Dimensions Image: 15 15/16 × 12 in. (40.5 × 30.5 cm)
Plate: 15 15/16 × 12 in. (40.5 × 30.5 cm)
Sheet: 22 1/2 × 19 in. (57.2 × 48.3 cm)
Credit Line Museum purchase with funds from Donald, Nicole, and Dexter Griffin, Janice and William Wiggins, Jr., Mary E. Wiggins, Kevin and Dianne Brown, Beverly Calender-Anderson, Frank Motley and Valeri Haughton-Motley, and Tanya Mitchell-Yeager in honor of Black History Month, and the estate of Herman B Wells via the Joseph Granville and Anna Bernice Wells Memorial Fund, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2015.158

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About this Work

By co-opting the format of traditional half-length portraits, Kerry James Marshall’s depiction of an unidentified sitter in a camouflage hoodie (the first example by the artist in our collection) counters the negative portrayal of young black men—his so-called “lost boys”—commonly seen in the media. In it, Marshall emphatically embraces the beauty and positiveness of blackness by choosing a solid black background and a very dark-skinned subject, whose face dramatically reflects spots of light. He hopes to offer an alternative to stereotypical depictions of African Americans found in many historical representations and to add diversity to faces displayed on museum walls.


Provenance research is ongoing for this and many other items in the Eskenazi Museum of Art permanent collection. For more information about the provenance of this artwork, please contact the department curator with specific questions.

Publisher Paulson Fontaine Press

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"Untitled (Handsome Young Man) | Collections Online." Collections Online. Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2024. https://artmuseum.indiana.edu/collections-online/browse/object.php?number=2015.158