Kerry James Marshall: Scouts

[Kerry James Marshall](/artist/kerry-james-marshall), known for his empowering portraits of black men and women, began painting Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in 1995, deifying these figures with saint-like halos of light. When Marshall’s “Scout” paintings were first exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1998, *The New York Times* critic Holland Cotter described the groundbreaking nature of these images. “In these portraits, time-honored American values—community, leadership, duty—that were also the bedrock of the early civil rights movement, are reconfirmed and radically recast,” he [wrote](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/02/arts/art-review-in-civil-rights-ferment-a-conflicted-nostalgia.html). While the “Scout” paintings now belong to permanent museum collections, collectors can bring home embroidered versions of these seminal images. Released by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2017, these scout patches recreate six of Marshall’s “Scout” paintings in rayon thread: *Brownie* (1995), *Cub Scout* (1995), *Scout (Girl)* (1995), *Scout (Boy)* (1995), *Den Mother* (1996), and *Scout Master* (1996).