The day before his survey exhibition “The Histories” opened to the public — his largest presentation of work in Europe, with more than 70 works made over four and a half decades — Kerry James Marshall sat in one of the soaring picture galleries of the Royal Academy of Art.
On the walls were his newest paintings, from the series “Africa Revisited,” several of which focus on the considerable role African elites played in capturing and selling other Africans to European slave traders. It is a subject that has been widely written about by historians, but has rarely, if ever, been broached in the visual arts.