Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Royal Academy of Arts, London
From September 20th, 2025 until January 18th, 2026
Featuring over 70 works from museums and private collections across North America and Europe, the exhibition offers an in-depth exploration of one of the most significant careers in contemporary art. Marshall is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative contemporary history painters. His monumental canvases tackle complex themes: from the Middle Passage to the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, including imagined portraits of figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Tubman. With a powerful figurative style and complete mastery of classical pictorial language, Marshall reinterprets Western tradition by placing Black presence at its center. His works, influenced by art history as well as pop culture, Afrofuturism, and science fiction, celebrate everyday life and envision more equitable and representative futures.
opening image: Kerry James Marshall, Knowledge and Wonder, 1995.
The exhibition is organised into eleven thematic sections spanning over forty years of artistic practice. It begins with The Academy (2012), where a male model in an art school strikes the Black Power salute, and continues with early works from the 1980s, including A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) and Invisible Man (1986). These foundational pieces reflect his long-standing commitment to giving visibility to Black subjects historically excluded from art history.
Two main galleries are devoted to Marshall’s celebrated depictions of everyday Black life: picnics, children playing, beauty salons, and intimate family moments are elevated to epic narrative. Standout works include School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) and Knowledge and Wonder (1995), Marshall’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside of Chicago.
The historical section includes key works such as Great America (1994), Souvenir (1997–98), and the Vignette series (2003–2014), which explore the memory of slavery and African American resistance. Another room gathers imagined portraits of historic Black figures, reflecting on painting’s power to construct memory in the absence of archival images.
The exhibition concludes with Wake (2003–ongoing), a continually evolving sculpture, and a brand-new cycle of eight previously unseen paintings examining the transatlantic slave trade from the African perspective. Through this, Marshall reasserts his central role in redefining history painting for the contemporary era.
