Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
20th September, 2025 – 18th January, 2026
Royal Academy of Arts
Main Galleries
Burlington House,
Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD
The Royal Academy of Arts stages the largest Kerry James Marshall exhibition outside the United States, with 70 works exploring Black life, history and art’s grand narratives.
This autumn, the Royal Academy of Arts will present Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, the largest exhibition of the artist’s paintings ever held outside the United States. Bringing together 70 works, it offers British audiences a rare chance to encounter the epic style of one of America’s most celebrated living painters.
Marshall, who served on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2013, has spent more than four decades reshaping the Western tradition of history painting to centre the Black figure — a subject long absent from its grand narratives. His vivid, often monumental canvases weave together art-historical references, the civil rights movement, comics, science fiction, personal memory and the everyday.
Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994
Acrylic and collage on canvas. 254 x 360.7 cm. Denver Art Museum. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Best known for his distinctive, jet-black protagonists, Marshall confronts the historical invisibility of African Americans while challenging inherited ideals of beauty and heroism as white. In his hands, the Black body becomes both witness and protagonist — occupying spaces from the era of slavery to the present day, from imagined pasts to speculative futures.
Highlights include Knowledge and Wonder (1995), a monumental commission for the Chicago Public Library never before loaned, alongside paintings, comics, photography, installations and video. Together, these works celebrate Black life, interrogate the erasures of art history, and propose an optimistic reimagining of its future.
About Kerry James Marshall
Born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Los Angeles, Kerry James Marshall has spent his career reimagining the art-historical canon to centre Black life. A graduate of Otis College of Art and Design and a onetime student of Charles White, Marshall is known for large-scale figurative paintings, printmaking, and public art that explore African-American history, identity, and beauty. His works, from the seminal.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) to the retrospective Mastry (2016), confront histories of absence and invisibility, reclaiming the Black figure’s place in Western art. Based in Chicago, Marshall has received numerous honours, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and continues to shape contemporary visual culture through his bold narratives and monumental visions.
Untitled (Blanket Couple), 2014
Acrylic on PVC panel, in artist’s frame. 150.2 x 242.5 cm. Fredriksen Family Art Collection. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London
Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.
The Kerry James Marshall Supporters Circle: Brooke Brown Barzun and Matthew Barzun, Mr and Mrs Lee Broughton, Mercedes Vilardell, Erica Wax and Andrew Balls, Eleanor Heyman Propp and those that wish to remain anonymous.
With additional support from: The Lawrence and Carol Saper Foundation, Caryl Englander, The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust/John Silberman, Susan Manilow, Paul & De Gray, Denise & Gary Gardner, Anita Blanchard, MD and Martin Nesbitt, Lady Alison Deighton, ARTscapades and those who wish to remain anonymous.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories opens on the 20th of September, 2025 until the 18th of January, 2026 at The Royal Academy of Arts
©2025 Kerry James Marshall, Royal College of Arts
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