What We See—and What We’re Meant to See: Questioning Representation

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533. Oil on oak.

For centuries, museums have shown us who matters. Or rather, who has been allowed to matter. Wander the halls of nearly any major institution—from the Louvre to the Prado to the Uffizi—and the message is as clear as the oil on canvas: kings, queens, saints, scholars. And they are, overwhelmingly, white. They are painted in golds and crimsons, lit with divine light, wrapped in the authority of the brush. For centuries, Black people were simply not there—not as dignified subjects, not as makers of the work, and rarely as the intended audience.

Kerry James Marshall was one of the first to ask, Why not? More importantly: What does it take to be included?

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Los Angeles, Marshall emerged from the civil rights era with the awareness that to be seen in fine art was not a given, but a battle. His solution was not to dismantle the art world from the outside—but to learn its rules so thoroughly, so intimately, that he could remake it from within. If the European masters were the gatekeepers, he would master what they knew, and then open the gates himself.

Marshall has said that representation—literal, figural, unapologetic Blackness—is political. But it’s not only political. It’s also aesthetic, emotional, historical. The absence of Black figures in art was not accidental; it was structural. And so the work of putting them there—central, dignified, undeniable—is revolutionary.

What makes Marshall’s work so effective is how it bridges the distance between worlds. His paintings are deeply Afrocentric, saturated with Black experience, symbolism, and interiority. And yet, their execution is steeped in the traditions of European art: chiaroscuro, perspective, proportion, control. He understood that to make work that could not be ignored by those institutions, he had to meet them on their own terms—and then remake those terms in his own image.

Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012.

School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), a large, vibrant painting that places viewers inside a bustling Black beauty salon. The scene is joyful, full of detail—young girls, stylists, customers, and hair products rendered with the precision of Dutch still life. But something else is happening. At the lower right, a distorted shape floats in the room. It’s based on the anamorphic skull from Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors, a Renaissance masterpiece famed for its memento mori—a hidden skull only visible from an extreme angle. Marshall’s reference is deliberate—not only inserting Black subjects into the lineage of fine art, but doing so with the same symbolic precision and visual intelligence that defines its canon. He’s reminding us that beauty and mortality, power and impermanence, are themes that belong to Black life, too.

Kerry James Marshall, Heirlooms and Accessories, 2002.

Then there is Heirlooms and Accessories (2002), a quieter but even more haunting piece. At first glance, the work presents three elegant, oval-framed cameos mounted on velvet, reminiscent of treasured family portraits. Each cameo contains the silhouetted profile of a Black woman—lovely, timeless, almost decorative. But a second look reveals the truth: the “accessories” they wear are not pearls or pins, but nooses. The women are Mary Turner and other victims of racial terror, executed in acts of white supremacist violence. Marshall forces the viewer to confront the dissonance between beauty and brutality, remembrance and repression. Here, the heirloom is the horror—and the accessory is the history we choose to forget.

These are not simply artworks. They are corrections. Reclamations. Visual indictments of a system that excluded Black subjects for centuries while pretending to uphold universal ideals.

At the Northeast Louisiana Delta African-American Heritage Museum, we’re not only interested in who is on the wall—we’re just as concerned with who is in the room. Our mission is rooted in visibility, but also in engagement. That means cultivating the next generation of creators and critical thinkers. It means offering young people—especially those in our own Delta communities—an introduction to visual art that includes them, reflects them, and speaks their language.

It also means providing a space where working artists—established, emerging, or returning—can deepen their craft, challenge their assumptions, and grow. Artists like Frank Kelley Jr., Daryl Triplett, Bernard Manyweather, and others didn’t just find exhibition space at the museum—they found a place that believed in their potential to shape what fine art looks like, not just regionally, but nationally and globally.

We see ourselves as both a starting point and a home base—for students whose first museum visit sparks a lifelong pursuit, and for mature artists whose voices deserve to be amplified on larger stages. Creativity doesn’t expire with age, and innovation often comes from the most unexpected corners. Our museum is here to nurture both, knowing full well that some of the most revolutionary contributions to the fine art world may very well begin here, in Monroe, in the Delta, among neighbors.

Marshall reminds us: to make work is one thing. To rewrite the visual record—that’s another. And to show that work in spaces that understand its urgency is everything. -