Kerry James Marshall: The Histories

Beauty salons and outdoor gathering places become the settings for large-scale paintings in Kerry James Marshall: The Histories. At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the exhibition follows more than four decades of Marshall’s practice through seventy works, including eight paintings made especially for the exhibition.

His compositions place Black figures within pictorial traditions that have often excluded them, drawing on the history of Western painting and popular culture. Everyday scenes sit alongside imagined portraits of historical figures and works addressing the Middle Passage. The presentation follows these different bodies of work as Marshall develops ways to represent lives and histories within painting.