Drawing upon art historical sources, contemporary culture, and comics, Kerry James Marshall vibrant paintings boldly challenge the past. Through often monumental portraits of Black figures, the Chicago-based artist (previously) delves into themes of race, identity, legacy, and representation to bridge history and the present and imagine a better future.
In the largest survey of the artist’s work ever presented outside of the U.S., the Royal Academy of Arts hosts Kerry James Marshall: The Histories. Organized in collaboration with Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, the exhibition opens next month and features more than 70 works that span the artist’s career thus far. The show also includes a monumental oil painting commissioned for the Chicago Public Library titled “Knowledge and Wonder,” which is on loan for the first time.
The Histories is organized into 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present, inviting viewers through a thematic and stylistic journey. The exhibition opens with “The Academy,” painted in 2012. A male model in a life drawing class stands in front of a patterned backdrop and looks directly at the viewer, giving the iconic raised fist of the Black Power movement.
Marshall has long been guided by his early encounters with European art in museums and books, where he recognized a stark lack of Black figures. By the 1980s, he focused on the idea of visibility, creating the seminal piece “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self,” which emphasizes his interest in confronting stereotypes.
Typically working in series or cycles, Marshall often touches upon epochal social and political paradigms of the past, like slavery and the Middle Passage, Black Power and the Civil Rights movement, and the historical omission of people of color from Western painting traditions. His works often highlight daily African American experience and elevate everyday activities and interactions, like gathering at the barber shop, making a painting, relaxing at the park, or hanging out on the porch. Marshall posits that the past can be a tool with which to hew the future.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories opens on September 20 and continues through January 18 in London. Plan your visit on the RA’s website.
