Viewing Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at Royal Academy of Art

Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s greatest living painters. The 69-year old artist and professor was born in Alabama and grew up in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, close to the Black Panther’s headquarters in the 1960s and the period of race riots and protests across the city at the time would come to instill in Marshall an acute sense of social responsibility and justice.

This sense is keenly felt in Marshall’s figurative paintings, gorgeous, glorious and powerful paintings of Black Americans. Large in scale they cannot be ignored, giving the figures a presence in the hallowed halls of culture they had previously been denied. Referencing art history, civil rights, comics, science fiction and personal memories, Marshall’s works are each enriched by reality and imagination, steeped in allegory. But as the artist once said: “I don’t want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I’m really interested in.”

This anticipated exhibition at the Royal Academy is the largest exhibition ever held on the American artist outside of the US and includes over 70 works made over his career to date, including his giant public commission Knowledge and Wonder (1995) – on loan for the first time.