‘Everything you need to know is in the picture’

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, on show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 18 January 2026. It is the first big retrospective of the work of this major American artist to be held in the UK.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) is a small black-on-black self-portrait painted in egg tempera. It hangs in the second of 11 galleries at London’s Royal Academy, a major retrospective celebrating the art of African American artist Kerry James Marshall, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955.

Marshall’s family relocated to Los Angeles when he was eight and he recalls wanting to ‘make pictures’ from an early age. As an avid visitor to the newly opened LA County Museum and the Pasadena Art Museum and a keen student of the literature on Western art history, it was the absence of the Black body that motivated his decision to make the depiction of everyday scenes from Black lives his subject matter. A key early influence was the African American artist and teacher Charles White, discovered when Marshall was studying at the Otis Art Institute where White taught. Through drawings, paintings and prints, White documented the daily life of Black subjects, enabling Marshall to develop his own personal pictorial language.

After early experiments with varieties of image-making, including mixed-media collage, he sought ways to re-figure Western genres of picture making to insert the Black body into art history. A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self, painted two years after graduating from Otis, presents a parodic take on stereotypes of Black subjectivity. This small self-portrait combines art historical references – the medium of egg tempera used in early Sienese painting and also by the American regionalist Ben Shahn – and elements of modernist abstraction, for example Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, with the social reductiveness of race to a typology. Marshall also borrows from literature, such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the protagonist of Ralf Ellison’s account of the invisibility of Black people in mid-20th century America (Invisible Man, 1952). (…)

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Jon Bird

Jon Bird is an artist, writer and curator, and Emeritus Professor of Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University, London. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, 20 September 2025-18 January 2026, is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.