“Kerry James Marshall: The Histories” at the Royal Academy of Arts

I n The Academy, 2012, the painting that anchors the first gallery of Kerry James Marshall’s blockbuster survey The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts, a male figure drawing model stands on a small platform, fist raised in the Black Power salute. Behind him, a cascade of draped fabrics in red, black and green overlap into a potent backdrop that evokes the pan-African flag, a symbol of liberation. Drawn up across the front of the work, like the parting of a curtain, an arc of pristine white fabric frames the scene and welcomes the viewer to participate in the kind of life drawing class for which the Royal Academy of Arts is famous.

Over the course of his vast and varied career, Marshall has employed the language of Western art history to represent Black figures inhabiting everyday spaces and performing everyday rituals. These virtuosic paintings — often monumental in scale with a lyrical use of color and blacks of chromatic intensity — explore themes of Black identity and African American history. At the RA, where this most extensive European exhibition of Marshall’s work unites not only these large-scale history paintings, but also prints, drawings and sculpture, 11 groupings of his works from the 1980s to the present day attest to an artist continually extending tradition.

Marshall’s ambition as an artist versed in historical approaches is evident in the exhibition’s two largest galleries, where paintings memorialize the ordinary experiences of Black America in a way that recalls the 19th century painters of modern life. “I don’t do pictures in which the figures are abject in any way,” Marshall has said of his choice of subject matter. “I don’t do pictures in which the figures are traumatised in any way. I’m trying to create a certain kind of normalcy.”

In Knowledge and Wonder, commissioned by the city of Chicago in 1993 and Marshall’s largest painting to date, the quotidian takes the form of an inquisitive group of children and adults gazing up in wonder at a cosmos of oversized books. The epic painting, which is displayed in the Legler Library, travels outside the city the first time. Similarly, the later School of Beauty, School of Culture, from 2012, showcases the richly ornamented interior of a beauty salon in familiar detail, filled with figures conversing and interacting. In the foreground, next to a posing woman and between two toddlers, a distorted, anamorphic head of a blonde woman intrudes — Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty — echoing the famously skewed skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, 1533.

Three works from Marshall’s celebrated Garden Project also hang here. Begun in the early nineties, this large-scale series featuring collaged elements and gestural marks signalled a turning point in his career and set the course for the history paintings that would follow. These idyllic scenes evoke the utopian ideals that inspired public-housing projects in Chicago and Los Angeles, many of which carried the word “garden” in their names. Marshall’s lush surfaces and feelings of overabundance contrast lived reality. As the artist has explained: “There is a huge gap between the pastoral names of these places and what they actually are, but the world of the people who inhabit the projects is still filled with incredible hope and possibility.” Past Times, with its lounging riverside figures recalling the work of Georges Seurat, achieved $21.1 million during Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening auction in 2018, setting a record for the most expensive work by a living African American artist.

Another gallery unites the imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures, such as Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved African American artist, and Harriet Tubman. Tubman is usually remembered as an abolitionist in the service of others, but Marshall allows visitors to consider another, more personal, aspect of her life. She appears in a tender wedding portrait, held in the embrace of her first husband, John Tubman, and dressed in a smart emerald garment with gold buttons and large white bow. The painting, a picture within a picture, is staged as a tromp l’oeil still life: two pairs of gloved hands enter from out of frame to lift the artwork and mount it on a white gallery wall. On the right-hand side, a Black art handler wears one white glove and one black glove — an allusion to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, athletes who each raised a black-gloved fist in protest while on the medal podium of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Here and elsewhere, Marshall is prepared to confront issue of race and the darker legacies of Black life in America. Untitled (Policeman) from 2015, portrays a dispassionate Black police officer seated on the hood of his patrol car. His conflicting identities as both a Black man and police officer complicates the charged period during which this work was made, when the police killings of unarmed Black men, women and children helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement across the United States.

Other works parse rarely depicted historical narratives. A new series of eight paintings made especially for the exhibition addresses themes of the transatlantic slave trade and the complicity of Black Africans in the enslavement of their own people. These canvases present landscapes, shorelines and boat journeys whose skies with buoyant clouds and soaring gulls belie the weight of their subject matter. In Abduction of Olaudah and his sister, 2023, two children are carried off into dense foliage while an armed accomplice keeps watch. In Haul, from 2025, a paddle boat topped with a reclining African woman is encircled by wrapped gifts and a vase of flowers — spoils from successful trades.

The survey closes with Marshall’s poignant sculpture, Wake, 2003, which greets visitors in the final galleries. A model sailboat set on black Plexiglass, it appears to pull a web of portrait medallions — stand-ins for the descendants of the first 20 enslaved Africans who landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, to be sold at auction. A mourning vessel for the trauma of slavery, the piece continues to grow as Marshall adds new portraits, reflecting the expanding presence — and proliferating achievements — of African Americans in North America.

Sotheby’s is proud to support “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, which is on view through 18 January 2026.

^{Lead image: Gallery view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (20 September 2025–18 January 2026). © Kerry James Marshall. Photograph © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry.}