The day before his survey exhibition “The Histories” opened to the public — his largest presentation of work in Europe, with more than 70 works made over four and a half decades — Kerry James Marshall sat in one of the soaring picture galleries of the Royal Academy of Art.
On the walls were his newest paintings, from the series “Africa Revisited,” several of which focus on the considerable role African elites played in capturing and selling other Africans to European slave traders. It is a subject that has been widely written about by historians, but has rarely, if ever, been broached in the visual arts.
After days of showing collectors and V.I.P.s through the show — “doing the necessaries,” as he put it — Marshall, 69, was feeling good. “This body of work really represents a high-water mark,” he told me. “I’m pouring everything — the accumulated knowledge, the ability, all of that stuff — into these pictures.”
He created the new series over the past two years. “Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister” shows figures in a forest — not, as one might expect, heroically self-emancipating, but rather being kidnapped by an African man to be sold to Europeans. It is based on a 1789 account by Olaudah Equiano, who after years of enslavement, played a key role in the British abolition movement.
“Six for One” depicts a village celebrating after closing a deal — a half dozen human beings for a horse that sits, stiff and wooden, like a Trojan gift. A triptych — “Outbound,” “Haul” and “Cove”— shows Black figures in boats, rowing to and from unseen European vessels waiting offshore. In “Outbound,” a totem of figures — bound male captive, child and sea gull — teeters precariously. In “Haul,” an ebony-skinned woman lounges on a bag of cowrie shells, surrounded by luxury objects — an ornate clock, some porcelain, an empty, gilded picture frame, a blond wig with a gold tiara.
The series also includes two pictures of Africa’s “white queens,” the European women who married independence leaders — Colette Hubert, who wed the first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Ruth Williams, who wed the man who would become the first president of Botswana, Seretse Khama. They are two of only a handful of non-Black figures that Marshall has depicted in his career, and their presence here suggests that African sovereignty from colonization was never as complete as some would like to think.
The series is pure Kerry James Marshall, a painter who has spent his career depicting all facets of history, with little regard for mythologizing or uplift. “I’m not a romanticist about anything — I’ve seen too much for those fantasies about any kind of perfect Edenic past to be relevant to me,” he said.
“These paintings are not unique just because they’re about Africans, but because there’s complexity in the way we are being asked to think about and understand that history,” he added. “I am always trying to make the pictures that nobody else is making.”
In opening remarks at the exhibition, the curator Mark Godfrey commented, “They are complex. I think they’ll be controversial.”
Marshall disagreed with Godfrey’s characterization, however. “If you start thinking that they’ll be controversial ahead of time then you’ve already shut off a part of your attention to what’s really going on in the work,” he said. “I don’t understand why anybody would think these would be hard to digest or hard to encounter. The history is what it is.”
I asked, “Are there risks in presenting these events, which have long been used as ammunition by those wanting to play down or even absolve European and American culpability in the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, at this historical juncture?”
He responded, “Only if I was telling a lie.”
The artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa has been one of Marshall’s longtime interlocutors — the two met in their 20s. When Jafa did cinematography for the film “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), directed by Julie Dash, who was then his wife, he brought in Marshall as production designer. (Marshall’s wife, the actor Cheryl Lynn Bruce, played one of the lead roles.) “I always like to say that one of the superpowers of Black people is our ability to see the thing as it is, not as we wish it to be,” Jafa said in a recent interview. “Kerry knows this fundamentally.”
Marshall has been recognized as a generational talent. Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955, he moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 8 years old, eventually studying art at the Otis Art Institute (renamed the Otis College of Art and Design). He received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1997, participated in the Venice Biennale (2003 and 2015), and in 2016 broke a record at auction for a living African American artist when his painting “Past Times” was purchased by Sean Combs for $21 million. (The piece, which was sold by the scandal-plagued music mogul to a private collector recently, according to Marshall’s longtime gallerist Jack Shainman, is included in “The Histories.”)
The New York Times’s chief art critic Holland Cotter, in his review of Marshall’s 2016 retrospective, “Mastry,” called the artist “one of the great history painters of our time.” Tackling the genre — considered the most important form of painting by the European art institutions that held sway until the later 19th century — was always his goal ever since his first visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when he was 10, Marshall said.
That ambition — along with his pursuit of figurative painting at a time when the mainstream art world was insisting on conceptualism, photography and video — put Marshall out of sync with many of his white peers and art critics in the 1980s and 1990s. His continuing engagement with Western art was also at odds with the Black Arts Movement, whose adherents were turning to African traditions to make overtly political paintings that sought to celebrate and inspire their communities.
But as Marshall explained it, he has always seen his purpose as to make paintings centering Black subjects that could compete with the best that the art in museums has to offer, so good that viewers couldn’t look away. “If I’m going to be a self-styled, so-called history painter, then I want to do all I want to do the things that history painters had always set themselves to do,” he said during our conversation.
At the museum, the “Africa Revisited” series is shown alongside works that focus on Black life. But Marshall draws on that same canon for his compositions, poses, and techniques — and folds in much else besides, including Kongo nkisi nkondi (power figures), Haitian Voodoo and Yoruba religious symbols, street signs, record album covers, Disney cartoons and all manner of pop cultural references. He paints on PVC sheets whose smoothness mimics the wooden panels of early Renaissance painting, or on unstretched linen canvases hung from grommets. He uses acrylic paint instead of oil, though, and incorporates craft-store glitter as a stand-in for the gilding found in medieval and Byzantine religious icons.
According to Jafa, Marshall’s work is not a critique of what the canon leaves out. “It’s not a protest,” he said. “He’s engaged with short-circuiting ideas of who Black people are, and what we’re capable of, and what we’re thinking.”
In the Royal Academy’s galleries, we see Marshall tackle such topics as the Middle Passage; the rebels, artists and activists who fought for freedom from enslavement; the civil rights movement; the history of American public housing projects like the one he grew up in; the Black Power movement; and more besides. But he approaches his subjects obliquely, and without ever making spectacle out of suffering.
“In almost all the pictures I do, you have to reckon with the fact that the figures have agency,” he said. “That’s a foundational principle that I work with.”
Harriet Tubman is shown not as a fierce abolitionist but as a woman in love, embraced by her husband in “Still-life With Wedding Portrait,” from 2015. In a 2011 picture, Nat Turner, celebrated for his short-lived 1831 slave rebellion, is shown with bloody ax in hand, the head of the man who claimed to own him lying on a bed in the background, leaving the viewer to decide if he’s as heroic as Caravaggio’s David dangling the head of Goliath, or Gentileschi’s Judith decapitating Holofernes, or a mere murderer.
He approached the Middle Passage in a series of works that allude to the horrors that Black people experienced on or in water. “Gulf Stream” (2003), a seemingly breezy scene of people out on a pleasure cruise, is based on a Winslow Homer painting of a Black man whose sinking boat is being circled by sharks. In “Great America” (1994), four Black figures squeeze into a boat about to enter a carnival ride: another figure bobs in the water nearby. But this is no Tunnel of Love: The composition suggests John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark ” (1778) — an episode in the life of an English teenager, Brook Watson, whose leg was bitten off in Havana Bay and would go on to become a banker, politician and staunch defender of Britain’s role in the slave trade.
All of Marshall’s pictures are the result of his research into the historical record mixed up with other, often anachronistic, details, like Easter eggs hidden in the plot.
“My view of how history works is that it’s always part fact, part fiction, part fantasy,” he said. “If you look through these paintings, there’s a little bit of the discrepancy between what could have been real and actual, and the way it could be imagined.”
Marshall shies away from interviews these days. “The work should always precede the artist,” he explained. “If one spends the time and looks at the work closely enough, there’s nothing that’s not available.”
He has never made looking easy, though. Throughout his career, Marshall has used different devices, including layering of imagery, a multiplicity of details, and the use of monochrome to make his paintings hard to see without sustained attention. “Black Painting” (2003) is a prime example. Only after your eyes adjust to the subtle variations of tone can you discern figures in a bedroom, recalling the moment before the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed by the police in 1969, when he was just 21.
The “Africa Revisited” series of works departs from his earlier work dramatically — instead of layered or dark, these are bright, vivid and almost crystalline. “I’m distilling the image to what I think are the most necessary elements of the picture,” he said. “I’m looking to not have any loose ends anywhere in there, not only loose ends relative to the subject matter, but loose ends relative to the construction of the space that they are occupying.”
Marshall’s commitment to getting it right is precisely what allows him to tackle the subjects he does, the Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams said. “Only Kerry can bring this conversation — this confrontation with our own past — to us Black diasporic people,” she wrote in an email. “I will receive it from him in a way I might resist it from others. I know he’s done his homework — he always has.”
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art and is the author of “Whitewalling: Art, Race & Politics in 3 Acts.” In 2021 she was awarded a Rabkin Prize for Art Journalism.
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