Kerry James Marshall, another story

For more than four decades, Kerry James Marshall has rewritten the history of Western painting by asking a question that is as simple as it is radical: who has been excluded from the images that shape our collective memory? This question lies at the heart of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, the first major exhibition in France devoted to the American artist, on view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris from 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the exhibition brings together around seventy works, including eight new paintings created especially for the occasion. It offers the most comprehensive presentation ever held in France of one of the most influential painters working today. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Kerry James Marshall has developed a pictorial language that places Black figures at the centre of art history. His monumental paintings transform everyday settings - beauty salons, public parks and domestic interiors - into images of extraordinary symbolic power that engage directly with the great traditions of European painting. Marshall draws inspiration from artists such as Manet, Caillebotte and Seurat, as well as from nineteenth-century French painting, comics, popular culture, Afrofuturism and science fiction, creating a visual universe in which representation itself becomes a means of rewriting history. The exhibition follows a chronological and thematic journey through eleven sections spanning more than four decades of the artist's career. It opens with works from the 1980s, including Invisible Man (1986), inspired by Ralph Ellison's landmark novel. From the outset, Marshall confronts the question of Black visibility within the history of art, employing complex layers of dark pigments that challenge viewers to reconsider both the act of looking and the conventions of Western representation. A major section is devoted to the memory of the Middle Passage, the transatlantic crossing that forced millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas. Rather than depicting violence directly, Marshall evokes the cultural, social and psychological consequences of this historical trauma through images of remarkable poetic intensity. Alongside these historical subjects, the exhibition presents scenes of contemporary everyday life. Marshall's celebrated paintings of barber shops, beauty salons, parks and urban spaces elevate ordinary experiences to the scale of history painting. In doing so, he fills a longstanding gap in Western art by demonstrating that the lives of Black communities deserve the same monumental treatment traditionally reserved for canonical subjects. The exhibition also includes the Souvenirs series, inspired by the American Civil Rights Movement, the elegant paintings from the Vignette cycle, which combine Rococo aesthetics with the visual language of American greeting cards, and Wake, a cumulative sculpture that continues to evolve with each new presentation. Another section explores Marshall's imagined portraits of historical Black figures such as Harriet Tubman and Scipio Moorhead, questioning how portraiture can reconstruct identities for people whose images were never recorded. The final galleries examine Marshall's enduring interest in artistic education and cultural institutions. Among the highlights is The Academy (2012), in which a life-model raises his fist in the Black Power salute during a drawing class, bringing together the academic tradition and the history of the Civil Rights struggle. The exhibition concludes with eight entirely new paintings exploring little-known episodes of African history, including the role played by some African kingdoms and intermediaries in the transatlantic slave trade, further expanding Marshall's nuanced reflection on the complexity of historical memory.