ART CITIES: London-Kerry James Marshall

Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Kerry James Marshall is known for his expansive body of work, which also includes drawings and sculptures. At the center of his oeuvre is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility long ascribed to Black figures in the Western pictorial tradition, and the creation of what he calls a “counter-archive” that brings them back into this narrative.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Royal Academy of Arts Archivee

Marking the artist’s 70th birthday, the major solo exhibition will explore Kerry James Marshall’s expansive career to date. “The Histories” features 70 works, bringing together primarily paintings, as well as examples of the artist’s prints, drawings and sculpture, from museums and private collections across North America and Europe. The exhibition is the first institutional presentation of the artist’s work in the UK since 2006 and will include a dramatic new series of paintings made especially for the show. Revered as one of the most influential contemporary history painters working today, Marshall’s powerful, large-scale paintings address themes including the Middle Passage and the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; portray individuals such as Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Tubman; and create monumental scenes depicting contemporary Black life, elevating the everyday to the epic. He centres Black figures in paintings built on principles codified in the tradition of Western picture making, which he encountered in books and museums available during his childhood. Marshall’s work is informed by art history, contemporary culture, Afrofuturism, and science fiction. He engages hard questions about the past, celebrates ordinary life, and imagines a more optimistic future. Marshall works in series and cycles, as reflected in the exhibition’s thematic arrangement, which showcases 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present. The exhibition opens with works from the 2000s and 2010s, highlighting Marshall’s long interest in the disciplines of art taught in institutions such as the Royal Academy. The centrepiece of the opening room is :The Academy” (2012)  in which the male model in a life class strikes the classic Black Power salute pose with raised fist. The second room look at Marshall’s earliest mature works from the 1980s, including “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980) and “Invisible Man” (1986) . This section establishes Marshall’s concern with depicting Black figures, while also provoking questions about representation in art history and who and what has been excluded. The two largest galleries are devoted to Marshall’s ambitiously composed, large-format paintings that record scenes of everyday life in Black America. Deeply influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern life, and conscious of the absence of large-scale images of daily life in the work of many Black artists before him, Marshall depicts Black  families picnicking  in  the  park,  lovers  dancing, children playing in communal gardens, and friends hanging out in hair salons, for example in “School of Beauty, School of Culture” (2012)). At the centre of this room will hang the vast “Knowledge and Wonder” (1995) Marshall’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside of Chicago. The exhibition continues with works addressing the history of the Middle Passage like “Great America”, (1994) and the Civil Rights movement like the “Souvenir” (1997-78) and “Vignette” ( 2003 –14” series. A section bringing together imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman, question how historical portraits can be created in the absence of archives and earlier representations of individuals. On display in the final galleries is “Wake” (2003 – ) an accumulative sculpture which is decorated with new additions each time it is exhibited. The exhibition culminates with a new, never seen before body of work. These eight paintings wexplore episodes in African history and the transatlantic slave trade, particularly the active role African slave traders played in enslavement.

Photo: Kerry James Marshall, Knowledge and Wonder, 1995. Oil on canvas, 294.6 x 698.5 cm. City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Patrick L. Pyszka, City of Chicago

Info: Curators: Mark Godfrey, Adrian Locke, Rose Thompson and Nikita Sena Quarshie, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 20/9/2025-18/1/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.royalacademy.org.uk/