{"id":81996,"date":"2025-09-23T23:15:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T23:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/81996\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T23:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T23:15:09","slug":"kerry-james-marshalls-royal-academy-exhibition-features-new-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/81996\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerry James Marshall’s Royal Academy Exhibition Features New Paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tKerry James Marshall<\/a>, one of America\u2019s leading painters, is debuting a new set of paintings that look at the involvement of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade as part of his recently opened survey at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.<\/p>\n

\n\tComing toward the end of the exhibition, the works are included in a section titled \u201cAfrica Revisited.\u201d For these paintings, Marshall looks at \u201cchallenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists,\u201d according to a wall label. In an interview with the Guardian, Marshall said these topics are often ignored \u201c[b]ecause they don\u2019t fit the narrative of white people evil, black people good. It doesn\u2019t fit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tOne such painting is Abduction of Olaudah and His sister (2023), which takes as its subject 18th-century writer Olaudah Equiano who was kidnapped from Nigeria when he was 11. His 1789 memoir The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano details that \u201cthe children in his village were already used to being on the lookout for kidnappers while the adults were away,\u201d according to the Royal Academy. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the Guardian interview, Marshall takes this condemnation further, stating that Equiano passed through a complex network in which he \u201cdidn\u2019t see a white man until he got on the boat. That\u2019s the slave trade too. It\u2019s not just the boats. It\u2019s not just the trip across the Atlantic. It\u2019s everyday people who wanted some value from whatever was transpiring during the slave trade, people who participated as freelancers to get what they could.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMarshall had first made paintings about the Middle Passage in the early \u201990s, and five of those works are on view earlier in the exhibition. \u201cIt is a history understood in fragments, and accordingly \u2026 Marshall composes paintings with disparate images, motifs and textures,\u201d according to the exhibition wall text.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Three<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cKerry James Marshall: The Histories,\u201d 2025\u201326, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, showing, from left, Haul, Outbound, and Cove, 2025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: \u00a9David Parry\/ Royal Academy of Arts, London; Art: \u00a9Kerry James Marshall\/Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the latest paintings, Marshall presents \u201cconfident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange,\u201d according to the wall text. Three works that hang on one\u2014Outbound, Haul, and Cove (all 2025)\u2014show Black people taking Black captives in canoes out to slave ships, sailing back with their spoils, and returning to shore in celebration.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s easier to create boogeymen and scapegoats,\u201d Marshall told the Guardian. \u201cAnd it\u2019s also easy not to take responsibility for being a part of any of that. It\u2019s always somebody else. I think this is critical: in all of the works I do, black people have agency.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kerry James Marshall, one of America\u2019s leading painters, is debuting a new set of paintings that look at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81997,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,366,18,117,19,17,47643,54835],"class_list":{"0":"post-81996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-kerry-james-marshall","18":"tag-royal-academy-in-london"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}