Kerry James Marshall Retrospective Opens In Paris, Highlighting Black Life

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris has opened“The Histories,” the first retrospective in France dedicated to American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham). The exhibition, on view through January 24, 2027, features more than four decades of the artist's work, including 70 paintings, with eight new works specifically for the exhibition, though only one is new relative to its previous showings in London and Zurich.

Marshall's monumental figurative paintings center on Black life, challenging historical exclusion within the art historical canon.“You're never gonna see the range of treatment of Black subjects anywhere else, by anybody,” the artist stated in a video interview. He subtly references traditional art historical archetypes, inserting Black figures into nuanced scenarios where they were previously absent. He also creates counterfactual portraits for figures lacking visual records, such as abolitionist David Walker or a wedding portrait of Harriet Tubman, aiming to depict their“full humanity” rather than heroic, flattened representations.

The exhibition arrived in Paris following presentations at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Kunsthaus Zürich. It draws from both public and private collections, notably the Pinault collection and Fondation Louis Vuitton in France. The show is organized into 12 sections, spanning from 1980 to the present.

Curator Mark Godfrey addressed the Parisian presentation's distinct arrangement, noting differences from the Royal Academy show. In Paris, works are displayed against white walls with a single path through the space, contrasting with the 18th-century Royal Academy's enfilade of rooms, which allowed for long sight lines.“The first priority was to make things look great,” Godfrey told Observer. Given Marshall's lesser visibility in Paris compared to London, Godfrey prioritized organizing the series largely chronologically, except for the final third of the exhibition.

Marshall's work often engages with 19th-century French painting, creating a dialogue between contemporary culture, Afrofuturism, and historical patrimony. Godfrey pointed out,“In the wall text in London, we made reference to Manet and to Caillebotte and to Géricault and to David, and we're doing that here as well. The nice thing here is that those masterpieces are in museums that are a 20-minute walk away.”

The exhibition begins with a depiction of A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) within Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum (1981). During a residency at the Studio Museum in the mid-1980s, Marshall created Invisible Man (1986), a Ralph Ellison-themed painting. This work, featuring a Black figure against a black background, addresses the idea of invisibility and confronts stereotypes, also reflecting on 20th-century abstraction, particularly Malevich's Black Square. Godfrey noted that Marshall's works“are as conceptual as they are visual.” These are complemented by a later canvas from 2008, Untitled (Painter), which extends formal ideas of a Black figure-an artist with a smeared palette-against a dark background.

A sequence of four works from the early 1990s explores the legacies of the Middle Passage. Rather than depicting enslaved Africans in shackles, Marshall creates complex allusions between that history and 1990s everyday life. In Plunge (1992), a figure is about to jump into a swimming pool that“doubles as the Atlantic Ocean, or a diving back into a very traumatic history,” Godfrey explained. The works also incorporate African religious symbols, such as red crosses in Yoruban symbology associated with Eshu, and veves, pencil diagrams used in Haitian Vodou, in Voyager (1992).

Another section engages with everyday life, drawing parallels to French painters. Marshall spent time with Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which influenced Past Times (1997). This work is part of“The Garden Project” series, three of which are on view, set in project housing built in the 1940s and 1950s for migrating Black Americans. Though these communities became run-down, Marshall depicts people gardening, children playing, and teenagers dating, alongside Chicago skyscrapers, references to music by The Temptations or Snoop Dogg, and the Black middle class enjoying activities like water skiing and golf. Godfrey highlighted their innovative fabrication: large unstretched canvases, painted on paper sheets, sometimes with collage elements.“Why I enjoy looking at them again and again is as much because of how they're made as what they might be pointing to or about,” Godfrey said.

Godfrey drew a comparison to Jacob Lawrence's paintings, which, though smaller in scale, also depict both significant historical moments and everyday scenes.“That combination of commitment to history and everyday, I think Kerry's not the first Black artist to do that.” De Style, a 1993 work depicting five men in a barber shop, was one of the first paintings Marshall sold to a museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which he had visited as a child. The title references Mondrian's De Stijl movement, and the painting includes visual nods to Mondrian with planes of blue, red, and yellow. Godfrey noted,“He's very attentive to the organization of a picture” and motivated by“different strategies of pictorial craft.”

The exhibition also includes four“souvenir paintings” created for a 1997 exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, reflecting on the legacies of the 1960s in the 1990s. These works feature middle-aged, middle-class Black women in domestic interiors, presented as angelic figures under commemorative presences of historical figures such as the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and the four teenage girls killed in the church bombing. The increased visibility of Black American artists in Paris is notable, following exhibitions such as Mickalene Thomas's“All About Love” at the Grand Palais (December 2025–April 2026), Henry Taylor's“Where Thoughts Provoke” at Musée Picasso Paris (April–September 2026), a Faith Ringgold show in 2023, and Melvin Edwards' exhibition at Palais de Tokyo (October 2025–February 2026).

We previously reported:

Art Basel Paris, under new director Karim Crippa, features 211 galleries from 41 countries and expands its public program across the city for its fifth edition.

Paris's Galerie de l'Institut is presenting a spotlight exhibition of French figurative painter Jean-Pierre Cassigneul, on view through November 24, 2026.

Source: Observer Arts

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