THE PREMIERE ISSUE OF ART ICONS MAGAZINE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE ERIC KELLY MUSEUM ANNOUNCES THE PREMIERE ISSUE OF ART ICONS MAGAZINE
New Durham-Based Arts Publication Connects Artists, Collectors, Museums, Galleries and the Global Art World
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA — January 1, 2025 — The Eric Kelly Museum proudly announces the publication of the first issue of Art Icons Magazine, a new print and digital arts publication created to document, celebrate, investigate, and connect the people who shape the visual arts world.
Published by the Eric Kelly Museum in Durham, North Carolina, Art Icons Magazine is designed to go beyond simply displaying beautiful artwork. The publication explores the people, ideas, creative processes, institutions, relationships, and business structures that help determine how artists build careers and how art moves from the studio into galleries, museums, private collections, public spaces, and the international marketplace.
Art Icons Magazine will feature visual artists, collectors, curators, art dealers, agents, galleries, museums, museum directors, trustees, auction houses, art advisors, consultants, foundations, historians, educators, and other influential members of the international arts community.
Each issue will combine compelling visual presentation with substantial editorial content, including artist profiles, interviews, studio visits, exhibition features, art criticism, movement analysis, collector stories, museum features, and discussions about the business and culture of art.
A major goal of Art Icons Magazine is to help artists better understand the structure of the art industry. The magazine will examine who makes decisions, how relationships are developed, how artists gain visibility, how collectors discover work, and how museums, galleries, curators, dealers, advisors, and other professionals contribute to building artistic careers.
Published by the Eric Kelly Museum
The Eric Kelly Museum, based in Durham, North Carolina, is a private art museum dedicated to preserving, documenting, exhibiting, and advancing the artistic legacy and creative vision of artist Eric Kelly III.
Kelly is an abstract expressionist artist whose extensive body of work explores color, emotion, line, form, geometry, human experience, and visual communication. His practice includes thousands of works spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, public art, murals, and experimental artistic forms.
The Eric Kelly Museum serves as both an artistic archive and a cultural institution, providing a home for Kelly's work while creating opportunities for collectors and audiences to experience his artistic development across decades. The museum operates primarily by appointment and provides collectors with an opportunity to engage more deeply with the artist's collections and creative history.
Located in Durham, the museum represents a continuation of the city's long tradition of African American entrepreneurship, culture, education, and artistic achievement.
Building a Global Art Platform
Art Icons Magazine is envisioned as part of a larger Art Icons media and information platform, bringing together publishing, television, digital media, research, education, networking, and career-development resources.
The larger Art Icons vision is to create a bridge between the artist's studio and the people and institutions that can help move an artist's career forward.
For artists, the publication will provide knowledge and exposure.
For collectors, it will provide discovery and deeper understanding.
For museums and galleries, it will provide a platform for identifying and documenting artists and important developments throughout the visual arts.
For the general public, Art Icons Magazine will make the art world more accessible by explaining not only what we are looking at, but who created it, why it matters, and how it fits into the larger history and marketplace of art.
A Magazine About More Than Art
Art Icons Magazine is ultimately about the people behind the art.
It is about the artist working alone in a studio.
The collector discovering a work for the first time.
The curator developing an exhibition.
The museum preserving history.
The gallery building an artist's market.
The critic challenging how we see.
And the institutions and individuals determining which artists and ideas become part of our cultural history.
With its premiere issue released January 1, 2025, Art Icons Magazine begins its mission to become a lasting international resource for discovering artists, understanding the art world, and documenting the creative voices shaping our time.
ART ICONS MAGAZINEPublished by The Eric Kelly MuseumDurham, North Carolina
Eric Kelly MuseumWebsite: www.erickellymuseum.org
About the Eric Kelly Museum
The Eric Kelly Museum is a private museum in Durham, North Carolina, dedicated to preserving, presenting, and advancing the work and artistic legacy of Eric Kelly III. Through its collections, exhibitions, archives, and collector experiences, the museum provides a permanent cultural home for Kelly's evolving body of work and serves as a platform for connecting art, history, creativity, entrepreneurship, and community.
About Art Icons Magazine
Art Icons Magazine is a print and digital visual-arts publication dedicated to artists and the people and institutions that shape the international art world. Through profiles, interviews, criticism, research, exhibitions, and art-industry reporting, Art Icons Magazine seeks to make the art world more visible, understandable, accessible, and connected.
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MEDIA CONTACT 919-308-9090
Art Icons Magazine / The Eric Kelly Museum 103 South Elm Street Durham NC 27701 / erickelly45@gmail.com
Art Icons Magazine is a global print and digital publication dedicated to the artists, ideas, institutions, and decision-makers shaping the visual arts world. The magazine goes beyond simply showing artwork—it tells the stories behind the work, explores the artist’s creative process, examines movements and techniques, and explains how the art world actually operates.
Through in-depth artist profiles, studio visits, interviews, exhibition reviews, collector features, and investigative stories, Art Icons Magazine introduces readers to emerging, mid-career, established, and master artists while also examining the influence of museums, galleries, curators, art dealers, collectors, advisors, auction houses, foundations, and museum trustees.
A central mission of Art Icons Magazine is to help artists understand the structure and “pecking order” of the art world—who makes decisions, how opportunities are created, where artists should look for support, and what practical steps can help move a career forward. Every major profile is designed to give readers information they can actually use, not simply admiration for the person or institution being featured.
Art Icons Magazine also serves collectors, art enthusiasts, students, educators, galleries, museums, and people discovering art for the first time. Its goal is to make art more visible, understandable, and accessible while creating a lasting cultural record of the artists and ideas influencing our time.
As part of the larger Art Icons platform—including Art Icons TV and the Art Icons App—the magazine provides the depth, documentation, and critical storytelling that connects an artwork to the artist, the marketplace, and the audience. Art Icons Magazine: Where Artists, Art, Influence, Opportunity, and the Business of the Art World Come Together.
ART ICONS MAGAZINE
ART WORLD ICONS
Amy Sherald & Kerry James Marshall: Two Visions of Black Life, American History, and the Power of Painting
This issue of Art Icons Magazine brings two major American painters into one conversation: Amy Sherald and Kerry James Marshall. Rather than treating them simply as celebrated Black artists, the issue examines the different ways each artist has used figurative painting to challenge the inherited picture of who belongs in American art.
That approach fits the larger mission of Art Icons Magazine: long-form artist profiles, studio stories, exhibition essays, criticism, and strong visual documentation that allow readers to understand a practice beyond a single image. art icons audience
The central question of this issue is:
What happens when Black people are no longer visitors to the history of American painting, but become central characters in it?
Sherald and Marshall answer that question very differently.
AMY SHERALD
The Power of Being Seen
Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973, Amy Sherald studied painting at Clark Atlanta University and later received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has become one of the most recognizable figurative painters of her generation, particularly after painting the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Whitney Museum of American Art
But the Michelle Obama portrait is only one chapter of Sherald's larger project.
Her real subject is the everyday person.
Sherald selects, styles, photographs, and then paints her subjects, creating images that occupy a space somewhere between portraiture, storytelling, fashion, photography, and American realism. The Whitney Museum has described her figures as specific individuals who also become characters within imagined versions of American life. Whitney Museum of American Art
One of Sherald's most identifiable techniques is her treatment of skin in grisaille—shades of gray rather than naturalistic brown tones. She has used this approach since the early years of her mature practice. The effect is striking: clothing and backgrounds may explode with color while the figure remains calm, deliberate, and visually separated from conventional racial color coding. Whitney Museum of American Art
The Sherald Story
Sherald often gives us people who are not performing for the viewer.
They stand.
They sit.
They look.
They exist.
There is tremendous power in that simplicity.
Her subjects frequently occupy uncluttered backgrounds, allowing posture, clothing, gaze, and gesture to carry the narrative. Photography is also fundamental to her process; Sherald has discussed the importance of photographic self-representation to Black Americans and its ability to allow people to determine how they wish to be seen. Whitney Museum of American Art
Her subjects therefore become more than portraits of individuals. They become proposals for another visual America.
Works involving Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor sit alongside paintings of people who are not internationally famous. That decision is significant. Sherald gives the anonymous sitter and the historically recognized figure similar pictorial seriousness.
Her large-scale survey Amy Sherald: American Sublime, presented at SFMOMA and subsequently at the Whitney Museum, brought together roughly fifty paintings and positioned her work within the tradition of American realism while examining her decision to center Black Americans who were historically excluded from many conventional representations of American life. Whitney Museum of American Art
Sherald is not simply asking, Can Black people be represented in American painting?
That question has already been answered.
Her paintings ask something more ambitious:
What does American painting become when Black life is allowed to be ordinary, romantic, stylish, private, peaceful, mysterious, imaginative, and monumental?
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
Rewriting the History Painting
Kerry James Marshall, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, belongs to an earlier generation. His childhood intersected directly with the American civil-rights era. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1963, and he later studied at the Otis Art Institute, graduating with a BFA in 1978. Artist and educator Charles White was an important influence during Marshall's development. National Gallery of Art
Marshall eventually settled in Chicago and built a practice spanning painting, installation, printmaking, public art, and other forms.
Where Sherald often strips the scene down, Marshall frequently builds it up.
His paintings can be dense with art history, architecture, language, symbols, flowers, domestic interiors, gardens, beauty salons, housing projects, historical references, popular imagery, abstraction, and visual jokes.
Marshall has spent decades examining what he has described as a missing presence within the Western artistic "image bank." His answer has been to make Black figures unmistakably central to ambitious painting. His work engages traditions extending from Renaissance painting and portraiture to abstraction, murals, comics, landscapes, and historical tableaux. Jack Shainman Gallery
The Marshall Story
Marshall does not merely insert Black figures into old art-historical structures.
He interrogates those structures.
His figures are frequently rendered with extraordinarily deep, near-black skin tones. Instead of using darkness as an absence of information, he develops subtle variations within it.
The viewer has to look.
That act of looking becomes important.
In works such as Great America (1994), Marshall combines American imagery with references to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery. The National Gallery of Art describes the painting as transforming that history through the unsettling metaphor of a haunted amusement-park experience. National Gallery of Art
Other works engage portraiture, domestic life, artists at work, gardens, public housing, beauty culture, romance, memory, and the history of painting itself.
His major retrospective Kerry James Marshall: Mastry assembled nearly eighty works and examined a career devoted in substantial part to restoring the Black figure to forms of Western painting from which Black people were frequently marginalized or absent. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Marshall therefore operates simultaneously as painter, storyteller, historian, and critic of the visual canon.
His paintings essentially ask:
Who was allowed into the great painting—and who was left standing outside the frame?
Then he repaints the frame.
THE ART ICONS COMPARISON
Two Artists, One Larger Question
Sherald and Marshall share an important territory, but they travel through it by remarkably different routes.
Amy Sherald | Kerry James Marshall |
Often emphasizes individual figures and psychological presence | Often constructs larger narrative and historical worlds |
Uses gray-toned skin as a signature formal device | Frequently uses extremely deep blackness as a central formal device |
Backgrounds can be minimal and controlled | Compositions can be dense, layered and symbolically complex |
Strong relationship to photography and styling | Strong relationship to art history, history painting and the Western canon |
Frequently creates quiet psychological space | Frequently creates historical and cultural tension |
Makes everyday Black life monumental | Places Black life inside—and in argument with—monumental art history |
Often asks us to contemplate the individual | Often asks us to reconsider the entire visual system surrounding the individual |
The comparison should not suggest that one artist represents a progression beyond the other. Their projects overlap, but their methods and historical positions differ.
Marshall often confronts history. Sherald often creates room beyond history.
That distinction makes them especially compelling together.
Marshall reminds us that historical exclusion cannot simply be forgotten.
Sherald demonstrates what becomes possible when Black subjects are given the visual freedom to exist beyond narratives defined only by exclusion and struggle.
Marshall's paintings may say:
Look at what history left out.
Sherald's may answer:
Now look at everything that was always here.
THE STORYLINE FOR THIS ISSUE
“FROM INVISIBILITY TO INTERIORITY”
That could become the editorial theme running through the entire issue.
The story begins with absence—the historical exclusion and distortion of Black figures within large portions of the Western canon.
It moves through Marshall, whose monumental project confronts that absence directly and asserts Black presence within painting's grandest traditions.
Then the narrative moves toward Sherald, where presence itself becomes only the beginning. Her figures possess privacy, imagination, beauty, romance, fashion, ambiguity and interior life.
That creates a powerful arc:
Absence → Representation → Presence → Interior Life → Cultural Permanence
Both artists ultimately expand the possibilities of figurative painting. The Met has described Marshall's work as synthesizing multiple pictorial traditions to reassert the Black figure within Western painting, while the Whitney positions Sherald within American realism while emphasizing her expansion of whose lives that tradition represents. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Art Icons Question
This issue should leave the reader with a question larger than either artist:
Who gets to become an icon?
For much of art history, institutions, collectors, critics and museums helped determine which faces entered the permanent visual record.
Amy Sherald and Kerry James Marshall have each changed that conversation.
Different generations.
Different techniques.
Different visual languages.
But both insist that Black people belong not at the margins of American painting, but within its most ambitious possibilities.
That is what makes pairing them for ART WORLD ICONS more than a cover story.
It becomes a story about who gets painted, who gets remembered, who enters the museum—and ultimately, who enters history.
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