Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom
September 20, 2025–January 18, 2026
The Royal Academy of Arts presents The Histories, the largest survey of Kerry James Marshall's work in the United Kingdom and Europe to date.
Organized thematically, this exhibition highlights eleven distinct cycles of work, the earliest dating back forty-five years and the most recent premiering at the Royal Academy of Arts.
70 works are included, including the new series of paintings made especially for the show and the commemorative sculpture Wake which evolves each time it is exhibited.
Marshall’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with the histories of art. He reimagines and transforms the conventions and genres of Western painting, from portraiture and landscape to history painting, a genre that was first concerned with Biblical and mythical narratives, and has been used to depict contemporary political events. He also draws from the art of Africa and its diasporas, for instance Kongo nkisi nkondi ‘power figures’, and Haitian Voodoo veves–drawings used to invoke spirits. For Marshall, it is important that an artist knows the histories of art in detail in order to contribute to them in powerful, meaningful and original ways. Many of the works in this exhibition address moments in Black history from the Middle Passage and slave rebellions to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements which formed a backdrop to Marshall’s childhood. Most recently, his paintings challenge romantic representations of a past in Africa and confront difficult historical subjects that others prefer to avoid.
Elevating the presence of Black figures in paintings built on principles codified in the tradition of Western picture-making, the artist places Black bodies front and center in his lyrical, frequently large-scale figurative paintings and murals. His figures are at once individual characters and examples of an emphatic Blackness, real and rhetorical, and as such, provoke wider questions about the idea of Black figures in art.
Marshall states, “In all these works, whether serially conceived or not, the overarching principle is still to move the black figure from the periphery to the centre and, secondly, to have these figures operate in a wide range of historical genres and stylistic modes culled from the history of painting.”
The exhibition will travel to the Kunsthaus Zurich in Spring 2026 and the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris in Fall 2027.
Learn more at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Learn more about Kerry James Marshall.
