Image creditUntitled Acrylique sur panneau de PVC Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA. Richard Norton Memorial Fund © MAM Paris

At a glance

60–90 minutes

Kerry James Marshall rewrites the scale of history painting, placing Black figures at the centre of images that move between everyday life, memory and power.

Why go

This is the first exhibition in France devoted to Kerry James Marshall, bringing together 70 works, including eight new paintings made especially for the exhibition. It is a major opportunity to see how Marshall expands the tradition of history painting by giving Black life the scale, complexity and visual authority long reserved for canonical subjects.

You'll see

Monumental figurative painting · Black history and everyday life · Civil Rights and Black Power references · The Middle Passage · Art-historical archetypes · Eight new paintings

Pace of visit

With 70 works and strong historical references, this is a substantial exhibition. It is better seen slowly, especially if you want to follow Marshall’s dialogue with Western art history.

Don't miss

School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) — one of Marshall’s key works, where everyday Black life is treated with the compositional ambition of grand history painting.

Artlovers Tip

Look at scale and composition before subject matter. Marshall deliberately borrows the visual authority of Old Master painting, then changes who gets to occupy that space.

Inside the exhibition

Meet the artist

Key Movements

African ArtContemporary ArtPostmodernismSocial Realism

Medium

Painting

Genre

Figurative

Description

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France, from 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027. It is the first French exhibition dedicated to the American artist and presents 70 works, including eight new paintings created specifically for the project. The exhibition originated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and travels via Kunsthaus Zürich before arriving in Paris.

Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham, Alabama) is an American painter whose large-scale figurative works place Black subjects at the centre of Western painting traditions. His practice combines art history, everyday life, political memory and visual pleasure, making him one of the most influential painters working today.

Exhibition

Kerry James Marshall - The Histories

Hours & rating from Google

Paris, France

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