Kerry James Marshall reclaims art history
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In Paris, the Musée d'Art Moderne is exhibiting a retrospective of work by Kerry James Marshall, an American artist born in Alabama in 1955, who deliberately centered Black figures within the Western art canon.
For four decades, Marshall has worked to shift the established narrative of art history, not by rejecting its techniques, but by mastering and utilizing them to depict Black subjects in traditionally Western genres.
He challenged both his peers and members of his own community, who often favored art specifically for and by the Black community or abstract forms that moved beyond racial themes. Marshall distinguished himself from earlier movements in Black art, which focused on protest and creating separate artistic spaces. While other artists explored abstraction or deconstruction, Marshall chose to appropriate the established conventions of painting, technique, composition, subject matter, and insert Black people into scenes historically dominated by white figures.
He asked viewers to consider how art history would look if Black people had always been represented, and who has the right to occupy artistic space. His paintings often reference and reimagine classic works. For example, his piece Past times echoes scenes by Seurat and Manet, while School of beauty, school of culture draws inspiration from Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Holbein’s use of anamorphism.
Through these allusions, Marshall not only demonstrates his mastery of art history but also subtly questions its omissions and biases. The exhibition, titled Kerry James Marshall. The histories, features 70 works and runs until January 24th.
