Every Beat of My Heart

Series Title: Rythm Mastr

1999–2000

Carnegie Museum of Art

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Culture

America

Medium

Artist's newspaper

Measurements

Image: 41 x 24.6 cm (16 1/8 x 9 11/16 in.); Sheet: 43 x 29.1 cm (16 15/16 x 11 7/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Joan Tomkins and William Busta 2020.435.3.2

This artwork is known to be under copyright.

Location

Not on view

Did You Know?

Kerry James Marshall’s childhood fascination with Marvel Comics and specifically the Black Panther led him to create this graphic novelette featuring a Black superhero set within his native South Side Chicago.

Description

Inspired by his childhood fascination with Marvel Comics, the artist Kerry James Marshall set out to create a modern-day, black superhero. The story of Rythm Mastr centers around the eponymous super-hero character and his protégé Farrell and is set within the context of the controversial razing of public housing projects in the South Side of Chicago (near Marshall’s home) and increased violence in the city. The two main characters have the power to bring Egyptian and African statues to life at the museum and imbue them with superpowers akin to the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon. The characters debate intellectual history, philosophy, and politics in Black vernacular English—offering up an alternative reality for Marshall’s South Side Chicago neighborhood that combines past, present, and future.

$A vertically oriented print in grainy ink features six panels colored in muted lavender, yellow, and gray. Scenes depict Black men with medium-dark skin tones talking and scuffling near parked cars. Below, a car speeds away with a white "SCREEECH." In the final corner, figures flee across a fractured landscape as a vehicle emits the words "POP POP POP." The tense urban narrative is captured through stylized figures and hand-drawn text.$