Europe’s largest survey of the American master opens in London this September
Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012. Acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas, 274.3 x 401.3 cm. Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth (Bibby) Smith, the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, Jane Comer, the Sankofa Society, and general acquisition funds, 2012.57. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema. The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris
This autumn, the Royal Academy of Arts will stage ‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’, the most extensive European survey to date of the acclaimed American artist and Honorary Royal Academician. Opening in September 2025, the exhibition marks Marshall’s 70th birthday. It brings together over 70 works spanning four decades, including major paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures from public and private collections across North America and Europe.
Marshall is widely regarded as one of the most crucial contemporary history painters working today. His large-scale, visually arresting works confront the absence of Black figures in Western art history while asserting their rightful place within it. Informed by a deep understanding of art history, Afrofuturism, science fiction, and popular culture, Marshall’s practice centres Black life—past, present, and imagined—within compositions shaped by classical techniques and traditions.
‘The Histories’ marks Marshall’s first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2006 and includes a dramatic new series of paintings created especially for the show. Structured thematically across 11 key bodies of work from 1980 to the present, the exhibition reflects Marshall’s practice of working in series and cycles.
The opening galleries foreground Marshall’s engagement with the institutional traditions of artmaking, as taught in academies such as the RA. Central to this section is The Academy (2012), in which a nude male model poses with a raised fist, evoking the Black Power salute and challenging conventional representations of the figure in life drawing.
The second gallery turns to Marshall’s early mature works from the 1980s, including the pivotal A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) and Invisible Man (1986). These works highlight Marshall’s long-standing concerns with representation, absence, and racial identity within the Western painting canon.
Two of the most extensive galleries are dedicated to Marshall’s richly layered depictions of everyday Black life. These paintings, inspired by artists such as Manet, Seurat, and Caillebotte, reflect on the aesthetics of modern life and reimagine who gets to be seen. Works such as School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) and Knowledge and Wonder (1995)—Marshall’s largest painting, shown for the first time outside of Chicago—depict communal scenes in parks, beauty salons, and libraries with epic scale and intimate detail.
The exhibition also features Marshall’s reflections on the legacies of slavery, the Middle Passage, and the Civil Rights movement, including works such as Great America (1994), Souvenir (1997–98), and selections from the Vignette series (2003–2014). A further section brings together imagined portraits of historical Black figures—including Harriet Tubman and Scipio Moorhead—highlighting the challenges and possibilities of constructing visual histories in the absence of archival imagery.
In the final galleries, Wake (2003–ongoing), a sculptural work that evolves with each installation, will be showcased alongside a newly created group of eight paintings that explore African history and the role of African slave traders in the transatlantic slave trade—material Marshall has never previously addressed.
The exhibition is curated by Mark Godfrey, Adrian Locke, Rose Thompson, and Nikita Sena Quarshie in close collaboration with the artist. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in partnership with Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, it follows in the RA’s tradition of honouring its Royal Academicians and Honorary Royal Academicians. Marshall was elected as an Honorary RA in 2022.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring new texts by Aria Dean, Darby English, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Cathérine Hug, Mark Godfrey, Nikita Sena Quarshie, Rebecca Zorach, and an in-depth interview between Kerry James Marshall and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’ will run at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 20 September 2025 until 18 January 2026. For more information, please visit the Royal Academy of Arts.
