Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Kerry James Marshall
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Des Moines, IA: Hansen Triangle Park
84%
A Monumental Journey. 2018. Manganese Ironspot brick, steel
This is Marshall's only public sculpture, and it's a doozy. It commemorates a dozen black Iowa lawyers who, in the 1920s, founded an alternative Bar Association because the main one in America wouldn't admit them. It takes the form of a West African "talking drum" that's been split in the middle and offset. The symbolic significance of both the drum thing and the splitting thing could be expounded upon, but this is less important to the aesthetic functioning of Monumental Journey (hammy name, though) than the sculpture's opaque and commanding — yet cordial, gracious — physical presence. (Less important because it's sort of one-note: Marshall himself has said, blandly, that the drum represents communication and the splitting represents unfulfilled hopes of equality. Snooze.) The sculpture is massive and literally looms over whoever's around it, plus its dark sheen and solidity seem almost to repel contemplation. But it also contains all sorts of niceties of design: all the bricks are tapered on one edge, but in the bottom half that tapered edge faces up and in the top half it faces down; there are lines running up and down each of the two segments that appear structural, but they're offset in a way that helps you find some visual footing along the otherwise unrelenting facade; the color of the bricks is surprisingly variegated, which makes the object seem a bit less domineeringly total. There's little else that I know of in Marshall's oeuvre that, to such an extent, balances a sort of minimalist absolutism of form with a master craftsman's affinity for flourish. (TFS, 2026)