18 September 2026 — 24 January 2027

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories

From 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents the first exhibition in France devoted to the American artist Kerry James Marshall (born 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama). Originated by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories” brings together seventy works, including eight new paintings made especially for the exhibition. Considered one of the most influential painters working today, Marshall is known for large-scale compositions that place Black people at their centre, often raising everyday life to the level of the epic. By inserting Black figures into the archetypes of art history, he asks viewers to recognise the undeniable power of presence. He addresses subjects such as the Middle Passage and the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements without directly depicting violence or alienation. His work draws on the Western canon – especially 19th-century French painting – as well as popular visual culture, Afrofuturism, comic books and science fiction. Organised with the artist’s support, the exhibition spans more than four decades of his career, bringing together many bodies of work – chiefly paintings, along with prints, drawings and sculpture – from museums and private collections in North America and Europe. With this tribute the museum continues its series of pioneering monographic exhibitions in France devoted to Black American artists, after Kara Walker (2007) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (2010). Marshall works in series and cycles, reflected in a chronological and thematic layout of eleven groups of works made from 1980 to the present. The exhibition opens with his early mature works of the 1980s, including Invisible Man (1986), inspired by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel. This section establishes Marshall’s commitment to depicting Black figures while questioning representation in art history and who and what has been left out; his radical use of a range of black pigments mixed with other colours shapes the viewer’s perception of his figures. The second gallery presents large canvases on the history of the Middle Passage, the forced crossing of captive Africans over the Atlantic to be sold into slavery. Monumental scenes of contemporary life follow, set in hair and beauty salons, parks and other outdoor spaces. Referencing Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern life, Marshall corrects the absence of large-scale images of everyday Black experience in Western art history. The Souvenirs series (1997–98) takes the American Civil Rights movement as its starting point, while the Vignette paintings (2003–14) depict Black couples in a style drawing on Rococo painting and American greeting cards. One of the key works is Wake, an accumulative sculpture begun in 2003 that gains new medallions each time it is shown. Another section gathers imagined portraits of historical Black figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman, exploring how portraits can be made in the absence of archives or earlier likenesses. The final galleries trace Marshall’s reinterpretations of iconic works of Western painting and, from the 2000s to the 2020s, his longstanding interest in the disciplines taught in art schools – notably The Academy (2012), in which a male model posing for a life-drawing class raises his fist in the Black Power salute. The exhibition closes with eight new paintings exploring lesser-known episodes of African history, several of them focusing on the transatlantic slave trade and the role some Africans played in selling enslaved people to European traders. The catalogue, published in French by Paris Musées and in English by the Royal Academy of Arts, is the most comprehensive publication on the artist to date and the first in French. It reproduces every work in the exhibition and includes a study by Mark Godfrey, essays by Aria Dean, Darby English, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Cathérine Hug, Nikita Sena Quarshie and Rebecca Zorach, and an extensive interview between Marshall and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris / Paris Musées and the Kunsthaus Zürich, the exhibition was previously shown at the Royal Academy (September 2025 – 18 January 2026) and at the Kunsthaus Zürich (until 16 August 2026).

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris