Marcus Kenney, 2022, the circus is in town, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
Possibly influenced by Jack Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels” and John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Desolation Row” features a surreal parade of Fellini-esque characters and vignettes that suggest the disordered urban chaos of America in the mid-60s.
At over eleven minutes in length, the song’s opening lines, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging” and “the circus is in town,” reference Dylan’s father’s memories as an eight-year-old of a lynching in Duluth. Three black men employed by a traveling circus were accused of raping a white woman, and on June 15, 1920, they were taken from custody and hanged, with photos of the lynching later sold as postcards.
Featuring a blind beggar, a one-eyed undertaker, literary characters (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), biblical characters (Noah, the good Samaritan, Cain, and Abel), historical characters (Einstein and Nero), fictional characters (Cinderella, Romeo, and Ophelia), and many more, “Desolation Row” provides rich and complex imagery and has been the inspiration for local artist Marcus Kenney’s solo show of the same name, currently on display at Laney Contemporary.
I meet Kenney (b. 1972) in his storefront studio on Waters Avenue where he is in the final push of preparing over fifty large-scale oil paintings inspired by the song he has always loved. “Every time I would hear it, I would have these visuals in my head.” With all the work created during the past three years, he began the project in early 2020 during COVID.
A native of rural Cooter Point, Louisiana, Kenney came to Savannah in 1994, earned an MFA in Photography from SCAD in 1999, and subsequently built a practice of photography, collage, mixed media installations, taxidermy, and neon sculpture. He has shown in New York, London, Miami, Hong Kong, Paris, and more, and is collected nationally and internationally. This is his first solo show in Savannah in five years.
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