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'Review: 'Everybody's Autobiography' is trenchantly observant

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 24, 2011 - For "Everybody's Autobiography" at the Center of Creative Arts' Millstone Gallery, curator Jessica Baran has paired works by Robert Gober and Kerry James Marshall, two of the most trenchantly observant artists working today.

Four framed prints by Marshall hang at eye level; they're heartbreaking, elegiac and yet mundane -- two portraits, a scene of a woman at a wishing well, and "Everything Will Be Alright I Just Know It Will" (2004), a rendering of a figure sporting a huge Afro and a Black Power hair pick.

Marshall's works possess the eloquence of unanswered prayers, and coupled with Gober's roads-to-nowhere, they generate a melancholy that somehow manages to buoy the spirit.

The exhibition's title comes from Gertrude Stein, who knew a little herself about the melancholic and the mundane. This is a simple, yet profoundly moving show.

Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.

Ivy Cooper
Ivy Cooper is the Beacon visual arts reviewer and a professor of art at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.