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Kerry James Marshall’s The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts is not just an exhibition — it’s a reclamation. Spanning over four decades of work, it places Black figures at the very heart of Western art’s most canonical traditions, from Renaissance allegory to history painting, and asks what stories have been excluded — and why.
The exhibition opens with Marshall’s large-scale paintings that immediately assert his signature visual language: figures painted in deep, unapologetic black tones against luminous, jewel-like backgrounds. These are people who command the frame. Whether seated in beauty salons or strolling through city parks, their presence redefines who is worthy of being depicted on monumental canvases.
The RA’s grand galleries amplify this mission. Works like Past Times and School of Beauty, School of Culture reference Botticelli, Gainsborough and Manet while transforming them into modern scenes of Black joy, love and everyday dignity. The show’s pacing cleverly mirrors the artist’s progression — from personal to political, intimate to epic.
Marshall does not offer easy resolutions. Later works tackle the violence and complicity of the transatlantic slave trade, the erasure of Black subjects from the Western canon, and the uneasy intersection between beauty and brutality. Yet the overall effect is celebratory rather than sorrowful: an assertion that art history is richer when it expands to include the full spectrum of humanity.
Visually lush and intellectually fierce, The Histories is a landmark exhibition — one that doesn’t simply hang on the walls of the Royal Academy, but rewrites its very foundations.
On until 18 January 2026.
Get your tickets here
WRITTEN BY: Nura Arooj