Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
20 September 2025 - 18 January 2026
Main Galleries | Burlington House
This autumn, experience the epic style of America's most important artist, Kerry James Marshall, whose powerful paintings place the lives of Black Americans front and centre.
Internationally acclaimed artist Kerry James Marshall is one of the most important painters working right now.
His vivid and mostly large-scale paintings place the Black figure front and centre. Marshall builds upon the Western tradition of history painting and makes visible those people who were so noticeably absent in the works that came before him.
These powerful paintings are full of references which span art history, civil rights, comics, science fiction, his own memories and more. He uses these to comment on the past, celebrate everyday life and imagine more optimistic futures.
This exhibition of his paintings will be the largest outside of the US, and the first chance for many to experience his works in the UK.
See 70 works including his monumental commission from the City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library, Knowledge and Wonder(1995), which has never been loaned before.
Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Download our large print guide.
Introduction to Exhibition
Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham, Alabama), is celebrated for his figurative paintings that “unapologetically” centre Black people. This exhibition highlights eleven distinct cycles of his work, the earliest dating back forty-five years, and the most recent premiering here.
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.
Recently, challenging romantic representations of a past in Africa, his paintings have confronted difficult historical subjects that others prefer to avoid. In the late 1940s and 1950s, popular American artists were championed or their expressive and intuitive paintings. Marshall, by contrast, gravitated towards a more rational approach to picture making, planning his compositions meticulously, every element carefully orchestrated.
At a time when art was often expected to provide quick meanings, is multilayered works insist on complexity, raising more questions than they resolve.
