Seventy paintings by Kerry James Marshall, the largest showing of his work outside the United States, filled the Royal Academy's Main Galleries.
The history painter Kerry James Marshall filled the Royal Academy of Arts’ Main Galleries in Mayfair from Saturday 20 September 2025 to Sunday 18 January 2026. The Histories was the largest exhibition of his paintings outside the United States.
Marshall knew he wanted to be an artist in kindergarten, when his teacher showed him a scrapbook of pictures cut from magazines. He studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles under the figurative painter Charles White.
He first boarded a plane to see a Picasso exhibition, Guernica above all. It set the scale of his ambition: to be a history painter like Giotto and Géricault.
His paintings build on the Western tradition of history painting and put Black figures at its centre. His subjects run from the Middle Passage to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and to barber shops, beauty parlours, parks and nightclubs. His portraits honour enslaved people, rebels and activists who were never painted in their lifetimes.
The exhibition held 70 works, among them Knowledge and Wonder (1995), his commission for Chicago’s Legler Regional Library, never loaned before. The Royal Academy organised it with the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.