‘Part of what I’m doing in my work is about attending to this absence of Black representation in the historical narrative,’ Kerry James Marshall told Apollo in 2019. ‘But the question is always then, when you put Black people in a picture, what should they be doing?’ For more than 40 years Marshall has been peopling his paintings with Black figures engaged in everyday activities or celebrating life’s joys. Resembling obsidian statues, they are arranged in ways that acknowledge and subvert art history – a classical pose here, a reference to Seurat’s La Grande Jatte there. This retrospective is the largest exhibition of Marshall’s work to take place outside the United States, and brings together 70 of his works, including, most remarkably, Knowledge and Wonder (1995), a seven-metre-wide painting of a dozen children and two adults gazing in wonder at a selection of books (20 September–18 January 2026). Marshall made the painting for the Legler Branch Library in Chicago, which is loaning the work for the first time.
Find out more from the Royal Academy’s website.
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