Kerry James Marshall - 2 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
I am adding the introduction from part 1 of this exhibition. If you read it before and do not wish to do so again, jump to Pantheon.
A thought-provoking exhibition which was so refreshing in its representation of Black people. Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama. His figurative paintings unapologetically centre Black people.
His 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 Haitan 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 this series of portraits Marshall pays tribute to slave rebels, poets, artists, abolitionists and activists.
Visible Means of Support, Mount Vernon, 2008, (acrylic latex on canvas)
Marshall depicts London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona - transported from its original site on the Thames and rebuilt in the American desert. At the painting's centre, a man wearing a sancwich board advertises 'Olaudah's Fish & Chips'. Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslated African writer, played a key role in the Abolition movement. Marshall draws a parallel between Equiano's forced displacement from Africa to the Americas and later London, and the translatlantic relocation of the bridge, to link histories of migration and two transformative commetcial ventures.
Believed to Be a Portrait of David Walker, c. 1830, 2009, (acrylic on PVC panel)
David Walker's 1829 pamphlet, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, was one of the most radical documents of the anti-slavery movement. The owner of a used-clothes store in Boston, Walker sewed copies of his Appeal into the lining of jackets. These smuggled pamphlets were prohibited when they appeared in the South.
Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry whilst enslaved in Boston and became the first African American to have a volume of poems published under her name: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). The original frontispiece of the book featured a modest side-profile portrait engraving of Wheatley. In contrast, Marshall presents the forward-facing gaze of a free woman, married, in the act of writing her second volume, asserting her presence and agency.
The Actor Hezekiah Washington as Julian Carlton, Taliesin Murderer of Frank Lloyd Wright family, 2009, (acrylic on PVC panel)
Julian Carlton was a Black servant from Barbados who worked at Frank Lloyd Wright's estate in Wisconsin. In 1914, Carlton set the architect's house on fire and murdered seven people, including Wright's partner and their two children.
Vignettes:
For Marshall, every historical genre and style of painting is ripe for reinvention, and in a long-running open series he has looked back to romance pictures, challenging himself to make serious and layered paintings with apparently light-hearted subject matter. By painting romantic scenes, Marshall produces images of resistance. 'Breeding', not marriage, was encouraged by some slave owners as a way of increasing their wealth and work force.
Although the paintings are filled with flowers and lovebirds, the various scenes are marked in other ways by signs of protest, including burning tyres and political flags. Surrounded by pink brushstrokes and presented as dream scenes, the works also raise the question of whether Black couples can really relax in public spaces or if this idea remains an illusion.
Vignette No. 13, 2008, (acrylic on PVC panel)
Africa Revisited:
Made specifically for this exhibition, the paintings here concern challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists. Five of them address the slave trade, showing people kidnapping children, rowing captives in a canoe to buyers out of scene, returning with all kinds of booty, and celebrating their successful trades.
As with his previous works, several of these new paintings present confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange. Another painting depicts the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers in Zululand in 1828. Together, these paintings disrupt a view of the African past, providing a fuller picture of a complex history.
As with his previous works, several of these new paintings present confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange. Another painting depicts the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers in Zululand in 1828. Together, these paintings disrupt a view of the African past, providing a fuller picture of a complex history.
Two paintings depict the so-called 'white queens' of Africa, Colette Hubert and Rugh Williams, at their weddings to Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. These scenes, showing real unions but with the details reimagined by Marshall, disturb narratives about the post-colonial period on the continent.
Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister, 2023, (acrylic on PVC panel)
This painting depicts a scene from Oludah Equiano's memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), in which he was abducted with his sister, aged 11. According to Equiano, the children in his village were already used to being on the lookout for kidnappers while the adults were away.
Assassination of Shaka, the Zulu, 2023, (acrylic on PVC panel)
White Queens of Africa: Rugh, 2025, (acrylic on PVC panel)
Ruth Williams married Seretse Khama in London in 1948. Khama was a prince of the Bamagwato tribe in the British Protectorate of Bechauanaland, while Williams hailed from a middle class London family. The marriage went ahead despite South African officials pressuring the British Government to stop it. After being forced to renounce his claim to the throne, Khama led Botswana to independence in 1966.
Focussing on Williams who was beloved in her adopted country, Marshall sets his painting some 18 years after the marriage took place, in front of the modernist General Assembly building in Bagorone.
White Queens of Africa: Colette, 2025, (acrylic on PVC panel)
Red, black, green:
In the works below, Marshall deploys the colours of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) or Pan-African Flag, created by Marcus Garvey in 1920, as well as the imagery and slogans of the Black Panthers from the late 1960s. But rather than straightforwardly celebrating Black Nationalism, Marshall constructs cheeky and layered works that also reference the connected histories of painting and erotica. Artists from Titian to Goya and Manet made famous canvases of reclining nudes. Marhall exchanges their female figures for a Black man who hides his genitals with a flag.
Similarly, struck by the lack of Black women in American pin-up magazines, Marshall decided to make his own images. One of his imagined models here becomes a 'Black Star'. The painting also references the 'Black Star Line' - the shipping company that Marcus Garvey founded in 1919 to encourage commerce with African and the voluntary return of Black Americans to the continent. Gripping a star like a shop's wheel, the woman here looks back like a model in a photoshoot. We are left to ask whether Garvey's creations are now just useful for making stylish and sexy images, or if his political project remains relevant today.
Keeping the Culture, 2010, (oil on board)
The past and future merge in this work. The Afrofuturist household appears to be in a cosmos far from Earth. The domestic interior is decorated with modernist furniture and ancient African artefacts, such as Yoruba sculptures. As the children look back at Earth, a hologram of the floating globe positions Africa towards the viewer.
These paintings are set in the middle class houses of Marshall's friends and relatives. Decorations in their living rooms include tributes to the assassinated Kennedys and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The works concern the ways in which the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, marked by unfulfilled optimism and political upheaval, might be commemorated in the 1990s. Two of the paintings memorise political and activist martyrs, who are silkscreened as a frieze across the top. The other pictures, redered in grisaille, expand the tribute to recognise the importance of cultural heroes who died between 1959 and 1970.
From left to right: Medgar Evers, Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley; Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner; Malcolm X; Fred Hampton and Mark Clark; Viola Liuzzo and Jimmi Lee Jackson
Souvenir IV, 1998, (acrylic, glitter and screenprint on paper on tarpaulin)
The painting of modern life:
In the 2010s Marshall continued to construct powerful scenes of everyday life. Some of those paintings refer to specific moments from the past, such as the crowning of Gloria Smith as the second Miss Black America at the height of the 'Black Is Beautiful' period in 1969. Others provoke questions about Marshall's own time: Untitled Policeman was made shortly after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement when protestors campaigned to 'defund the police'. Together, these paintings express a wide range of Black experiences of and attitudes towards America, from deep joy to a profound, uneasy ambivalence.
Untitled, 2014, (acrylic on PVC panel)
Two people stand in front of an abstract painting. The work cleverly brings together the languages of abstraction and figuration.
Marshall depicts a Black policeman confidently seated on a patrol car's bonnet. In the 2010s, police killings of unarmed Black individuals in the US were increasingly documented on people's phone cameras. The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013, and protestors frequently campaigned to 'defund the police'.
School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012, (acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas)
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