Christian Viveros-Fauné reviews Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at the Met Breuer, New York, on view through January 29, 2017.

Viveros-Fauné writes: “Self-portraiture, religious painting, history painting, landscapes, nudes, fêtes champêtres, abstraction and other tropes have all been mobilized by [Kerry James Marshall] to achieve his lofty artistic goal of painterly self-representation. But rather than aspire merely to what scholar Mark McGurl terms “the institutionalization of the anti-institutional,” Marshall instead constructs the foundation for a crucial conversation—one that swirls around the historical invisibility of the black subject and, by extension, the black artist.”