The Royal Academy will stage the most comprehensive exhibition of Kerry James Marshall ever seen in Europe. Opening on 20 September 2025, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories marks the artist’s 70th birthday and will bring together more than seventy works spanning four decades, from early paintings to a new cycle explicitly produced for London.
It will be the first major UK presentation of Marshall’s work since 2006. For the Royal Academy, the show represents both a homecoming and a long-overdue recognition of one of the most compelling painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Marshall’s practice has consistently redefined the terms of history painting. His canvases, often monumental in scale, make visible what Western art history rendered invisible: the lives, struggles and pleasures of Black communities. Figures such as Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Tubman and Scipio Moorhead appear alongside contemporary subjects – families at leisure, couples in love, friends in beauty salons – their presence given the same gravitas as the mythological or aristocratic sitters who populate European traditions.
The exhibition unfolds thematically across eleven sections. It opens with The Academy (2012), in which a life-class model raises his fist in a Black Power salute, an image that speaks directly to the RA’s own history and the politics of representation. From there, the galleries travel back to the 1980s, with early landmarks such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) and Invisible Man (1986), works that laid out Marshall’s enduring concern with visibility, absence and the politics of the gaze.
Two of the most extensive galleries are dedicated to Marshall’s depictions of everyday Black life, painted with a lushness and compositional ambition that recall Manet, Seurat and Caillebotte. Here, Knowledge and Wonder (1995) – the artist’s largest painting, travelling outside Chicago for the first time – will anchor a group of works portraying communal scenes, picnics, dances and domestic gatherings.
Other sections trace the Middle Passage and the Civil Rights era, with paintings such as Great America (1994) and the Souvenir series (1997–98), alongside imagined portraits of historical figures for whom visual records are absent. The show culminates in an entirely new series of eight works confronting the complex role African traders played in the mechanics of the transatlantic slave trade – a subject rarely given form on canvas.
Sculpture also features prominently. Wake (2003–ongoing), an accumulative work reconfigured with each installation, will appear in the closing galleries.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Marshall came of age in Los Angeles and has exhibited internationally since the 1980s. His major survey, Mastry (2016–17), at MCA Chicago, the Met Breuer, and MOCA Los Angeles secured his reputation as a leading voice in contemporary painting. He was elected an Honorary Royal Academician in 2022.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories continues the RA’s commitment to staging career-defining exhibitions of living artists. It follows projects devoted to Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Anselm Kiefer and William Kentridge. Marshall’s survey promises to be both a reckoning with the past and a proposition for painting’s future – an exhibition that will likely stand as one of the cultural landmarks of 2025.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories RA Saturday 20 September 2025 – Sunday 18 January 2026 10 am – 6 pm Tuesday to Sunday 10 am – 9 pm Friday