Opening at London’s Royal Academy of Arts on September 20, 2025, and running through January 18, 2026, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories marked the artist’s seventieth birthday and his most expansive European survey to date. Bringing together more than seventy masterworks spanning four decades, the exhibition also debuted Africa Revisited, an ambitious new suite of historical canvases painted specifically for the academy's grand galleries.
Marshall’s singular achievement in twentieth- and twenty-first-century painting rests on a deliberate, audacious strategy: mastering the grand academic conventions of Western history painting—from Renaissance linear perspective and allegorical compositions to Dutch genre painting—in order to populate the historic canon with the unequivocal presence of Black subjects.
His figures are rendered with an uncompromising, absolute chromatic blackness—utilizing three distinct pigments: carbon black, mars black, and ivory black, subtly nuanced with touches of cobalt blue and raw umber. By refusing naturalistic brown skin tones, Marshall constructs an unequivocal, rhetorical blackness that asserts itself as a profound optical fact on the canvas, confronting centuries of systemic absence across European museum collections.
In monumental series like the Garden Project (1994–95), depicting public housing complexes across Chicago and Los Angeles, Marshall subverted pastoral landscape traditions to portray Black daily life not as flat sociological tragedy, but with rich domestic intimacy, leisure, romance, and political agency.
At the Royal Academy—an institution historically founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds to champion grand historical painting—Marshall's retrospective arrived not as an outsider’s plea for inclusion, but as a sovereign master taking rightful possession of the temple. The Histories proved that figurative painting can dismantle its own exclusionary heritage from within, revitalizing history painting as an urgent arena for contemporary reckoning.
Sources: Royal Academy of Arts official catalog (September 2025); The Art Newspaper (September 19, 2025); The Guardian (September 21, 2025).