Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy

17^th September 2025

James White

James White

17 September 2025

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of the race riots of 1963, the lauded American artist Kerry James Marshall is widely acknowledged to be one of the important painters of contemporary times. Now, marking his 70^th year, the Royal Academy is holding a major retrospective of his career to date in the largest exhibition dedicated to him ever to be seen in Europe. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories features over 70 works, including eight paintings specially created for the current show. Marshall, an Honorary Royal Academician, draws on Western history painting traditions, his compelling paintings referencing enslavement, civil rights, science fiction and daily life with the Black figure forever at the centre. A Black man himself, Marshall has long chosen to paint his African-American subjects in a range of blacks, emphasising their “rhetorical” Blackness as he refers to it. The artist works in series, as the exhibition’s thematic arrangement clarifies with 11 groups of works dating from 1980 to the present day.

Marshall recounts early pivotal events in his life which sowed the seeds for his artistic future. The first was when his kindergarten teacher showed him a scrapbook of cutout and collaged images as a reward for good behaviour. He also has a vivid memory of encountering Renaissance paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at the age of eight in 1963, the same year in which his family moved to the Watts area of LA. The opening room of the Royal Academy exhibition underlines the artist’s decision to immerse himself in a traditional artistic training quite at odds with the prevailing conceptual landscape of the 1970s. One finds Marshall testifying to Western art’s historical bedrocks of art schools (like the Royal Academy’s own), studios and museums. The main focal point of this opening chapter is surely the painter’s 2012 canvas, The Academy. A male model in a life class strikes the classic Black Power salute with raised fist, forever etched in the collective memory by US Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s adopting of the pose on the medal podium for the 200m at the 1968 Mexico Games.

Marshall’s powerful work bears out his expressed ambitions to devote his art unequivocally to Black subjects. One early work stands as a key juncture in his journey, the 1980 egg tempera A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. The subject, a grinning man missing a tooth and wearing a fedora tilted to one side, evokes racial stereotypes. All of his clothes are black apart from a glimpse of a white shirt set against a black background, his eyes and gap-toothed smile emerging from the darkness. At the time, Marshall had just read Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel Invisible Man and was moved to reference its conceit of Black invisibility. The very choice of egg tempura, an essentially archaic medium deployed in brightly coloured early Renaissance frescos, provokes a challenge to the absence of Blackness in Western art history. A more recent work, Black Painting (2003), shows a bedroom at night, the details of which only become distinguishable as one’s eyes start to adjust to the light. The patient inspector notices the copy of Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning placed on the bedside table.

The hardships of Black Americans are a recurring thread. The RA’s grandest central gallery sees Marshall producing “contemporary paintings of modern life, inspired by how the likes of Seurat and Renoir transformed subject matter in the 19^th century. Seven of the Americans’ works here are unframed, with grommets attaching them to the walls. There are throngs of apparently contented people engaged in everyday activities in these eight paintings: lovers embrace, picnickers in parks listen to music on transistor radios as trails of lyrics drift out like musical speech bubbles. And then suddenly one’s attention is drawn in De Style (1993) – a notably impressive painting – to an easy-to-miss calendar that informs us that this scene is set just days after the notorious beating of Rodney King in 1992, which led to violent riots in Los Angeles.

The learned Marshall tackles some mightily serious subjects like the Northern Passage, the notorious voyage made from Africa to the New World by slave ships. He also deploys his luminous style to highlight the lives of marginalised figures such as Phillis Wheatley-Peters (1753-1784), who wrote poetry whilst enslaved in Boston, becoming the first African American to have a volume of poems published under he name. Difficult though these topics may be, the artist still manages to turn them into arresting images. Throughout, the American makes references to art history, doing so memorably in arguably his best known painting, School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). Set in a lively Black beauty salon, the painting is loaded with symbols of cultural identity, including a Chris Ofili painting poster, a poster of Lauren Hill of the Fugees and a Pan-African flag. An Observer’s eyes sweep over this feast of vibrant colour and humanity until coming across what at first glance appears to be an idiosyncratic yellow carpet. Only upon viewing the image from the right does one realise the artist, like Holbein the Younger, for his skull in The Ambassadors (1533), is using anamorphosis. The American replaces the distorted skull with Disney’s ultra blonde Sleeping Beauty, thus critiquing the imposition of white ideals of beauty on Black women. Richly layered and consistently captivating, The Histories enhances Kerry James Marshall’s reputation as the pre-eminent painter of Black American life.   

James White
Image: Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema

Kerry James Marshall is at the Royal Academy from 20^th September 2025 until 18^th January 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.