With The Histories, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents Kerry James Marshall’s first major exhibition in France. Bringing together nearly seventy works, including eight new paintings, the exhibition reveals the scope of an artistic practice that places Black figures at the heart of the grand tradition of painting while powerfully questioning how art history is written.
Kerry James Marshall at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
It is one of the major highlights of the 2026 Paris art season. From 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, the first major exhibition in France devoted to the American artist.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Kerry James Marshall has developed a monumental body of work over several decades, in which painting, history and representation are intimately connected.
The exhibition brings together nearly seventy works, including eight new paintings created especially for the project. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in collaboration with Kunsthaus Zürich, it offers an ambitious exploration of Marshall’s work.
But The Histories goes far beyond the conventional retrospective format.
One question runs throughout the exhibition and, more broadly, through Marshall’s entire body of work: who has been allowed to occupy the foreground of the history of painting?
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Bringing Black figures to the heart of grand painting
In Kerry James Marshall’s work, the presence of Black figures is never peripheral. It lies at the very heart of the painting.
The artist draws on the formats, compositions and genres that have shaped the history of Western art: portraiture, genre painting, landscape, history painting and monumental composition. Yet he transforms their protagonists.
His Black figures fully occupy the pictorial space. They are monumental, commanding and immediately present.
Marshall is not, however, simply seeking to address an absence by adding new figures to an existing narrative. His ambition goes deeper: he works from within the history of painting itself in order to expand its narrative.
Everyday life can therefore become monumental. A domestic scene, a garden, a beauty salon or an apparently ordinary moment acquires the dignity once reserved for the grand subjects of history painting.
A constant dialogue with art history
One of the great strengths of The Histories lies in Kerry James Marshall’s dialogue with the artists and works that preceded him.
He does not reject the Western canon. He studies it, masters its codes and appropriates them to construct his own visual language.
His paintings are filled with references to art history while simultaneously incorporating elements drawn from popular culture and contemporary life.
In School of Beauty, School of Culture, for example, art-historical references intersect with codes of beauty, sociability and everyday life. Different temporalities seem to coexist within the same pictorial space.
It is precisely this deep knowledge of painting that gives Marshall’s work much of its power.
He does not position himself at the margins of its history: he claims a place at its very centre.
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Black as colour and pictorial matter
This reflection on representation also unfolds through the very substance of painting.
In Kerry James Marshall’s work, black is never uniform. The artist explores its nuances, densities and relationship with light, giving his figures a distinctive pictorial depth.
From a distance, some silhouettes can appear almost absorbed by the surface. But as the viewer looks more closely, variations emerge. Features become clearer; clothing, faces and bodies gradually reveal themselves.
This experience of looking is fundamental.
The question of visibility becomes simultaneously historical, political and profoundly pictorial.
Painting history differently
Kerry James Marshall’s work also engages with some of the most painful chapters of Black history, from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power.
Yet violence itself is not necessarily represented directly.
Instead, the artist focuses on its traces, its memory and its consequences. History emerges through signs, references, symbols and absences.
The viewer is therefore not confronted with a simple historical illustration. We are asked to look, identify, connect elements and sometimes reconstruct what the painting does not explicitly reveal.
This is where the complexity of Marshall’s work becomes particularly powerful: it shows us images while simultaneously questioning what we have learned to see.
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Why “The Histories”?
The plural form of the exhibition’s title is essential.
The Histories does not tell a single story, but many: the history of Western painting, the history of the United States, the history of the African diaspora, the history of struggles and collective memory, as well as the stories of ordinary lives that have long remained underrepresented within dominant artistic narratives.
Across this remarkable body of work, one thing becomes clear: Kerry James Marshall is not simply introducing new protagonists into art history.
He is questioning the very way that history has been constructed.
Presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Marshall’s work takes on a particular resonance. It enters into dialogue with a city and collections deeply associated with the history of European modernism.
The movement therefore works in both directions: Marshall looks at art history, but his paintings compel us, in return, to look at that history differently.
A major exhibition of the 2026 Paris art season
With The Histories, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris offers French audiences an opportunity to discover the full scope of Kerry James Marshall’s work.
The monumentality of some of the paintings is immediately striking. Yet behind their visual power lies a much deeper reflection on representation, memory, visibility and the construction of narratives.
Marshall never turns away from the history of painting. On the contrary, he claims its legacy and demonstrates that painting can still produce new images and new histories.
An exhibition that reminds us that art history is never definitively written.
ART MAG will devote an in-depth feature to Kerry James Marshall and the exhibition The Histories in its forthcoming issue No. 35.
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Practical information
Kerry James Marshall – The Histories
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
11 Avenue du Président-Wilson, 75116 Paris, France
18 September 2026 – 24 January 2027
FAQ – Kerry James Marshall in Paris
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, located on Avenue du Président-Wilson in Paris’s 16th arrondissement.
The exhibition runs from 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
The Histories brings together nearly seventy works by Kerry James Marshall, including eight new paintings. The exhibition explores his relationship with art history, the representation of Black figures and major historical narratives.
Kerry James Marshall is an American artist born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. For several decades, his work has examined the place of Black figures within the history of Western painting while engaging with the major genres and traditions of art history.
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