Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The symposium ‘Kerry James Marshall: Conversations’ was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on November 13–14, 2025. Organized in partnership with Getty and Black Curatorial.
Watch more sessions from the symposium:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdcw4RhcVX8tC6yqFMlWNQgoouiyjbOeL
Speakers: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tamar Garb, Kelly-Christina Grant
Chaired by Dr. Mark Godfrey
This session delves into Marshall’s engagement with the different traditions, genres, and conventions of Western painting— from Giotto and Théodore Géricault to Piet Mondrian and Gerhard Richter. Focusing on how he has transformed these traditions for his own use, the conversation will explore how Marshall has approached composition, painterly techniques, and materials to, in his words, ‘establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally Black and beautiful’.
Kerry James Marshall and Portraiture: Blackness, Whiteness and the Abstraction of Colour
Presented by Dr. Tamar Garb
Portraiture is premised on the picturing of likeness. But this is as much a conceit as it is an impossibility. Portraits may substitute for a named individual, but they perform
their function due to a suspension of disbelief or an embrace of conventions and norms. Not least of these is the question of ‘colour’, whether racialised or naturalised.
Together with inherited codes of posing and performing a ‘self’ or a ‘subject’, portraits produce the identities they pretend to depict. Kerry James Marshall plays with the
assumptions and disruptions that an engagement with the genre entails, constructing a cast of characters that come to stand in for their historical personae. Whether compensating for past erasure or censure, correcting received narratives and norms, or staging race as an effect of surface manipulation and melanation, he makes us question what it is that we see. ‘Blackness’, ‘Whiteness’ and all shades of grey, as historically determining and deadly as they are, can also be seen as abstractions. Portraiture provides the site for their simultaneous enactment and denaturalisation, revealing them as the constructs they are.
Pictures in the Grand Tradition: Kerry James Marshall, French Painting and His Legacy on the Contemporary Black Diaspora Art Scene in Paris
Presented by Kelly-Christina Grant
This paper examines Kerry James Marshall’s engagement with the histories of painting’s conventions and genres in relation to the French canon, tracing his influences from artists such as Fragonard, David, Ingres and Seurat to his impact on the Black diaspora contemporary art scene. Marshall’s dialogue with French painting functions as both homage and critical intervention. He reworks the Western art historical canon to center Black subjects traditionally excluded from its narratives while also pioneering a postcolonial approach to the history of art. This paper also considers how Marshall’s practice has, in turn, inspired a younger generation of Black diaspora artists on the French scene who engage with his work and pursue his mission through the lens of postcolonial theory. Kelly-Christina argues that these artists interrogate Black diaspora history and the Eurocentric structure of French art institutions, drawing on Marshall’s visual strategies of representation to counter histories.
Materiality Matters
Presented by Dr. Mark Godfrey
Over the next two days, we will be discussing many of the histories that Kerry James Marshall addresses and rethinks in his works. Of course, Marshall spends considerable time reading and researching and speaking about these matters, but most of his time in the studio is spent planning compositions, making drawings, deciding how to work with materials, and what to do with colours. This talk will focus on this aspect of his practice and on the stranger parts of his work. As the curator of the exhibition, Mark spent considerable time researching Marshall’s ideas, but since the show opened, many additional details of the works have struck him: brush strokes, collaged papers, drips, colour chords, deliberately ‘unfinished’ parts of paintings. What does attending to these details do to a wider discussion of Marshall’s practice?
______________________________________________________________________
This program is associated with the Getty Research Institute's African American Art History Initiative, which focuses on the history, practices, and cultural legacies of artists of African American and African diasporic heritage.
https://www.getty.edu/projects/african-american-art-history-initiative/
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs.
https://www.getty.edu/research-institute/
The symposium ‘Kerry James Marshall: Conversations’ was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on November 13–14, 2025. Organized in partnership with Getty and Black Curatorial.
Watch more sessions from the symposium:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdcw4RhcVX8tC6yqFMlWNQgoouiyjbOeL
Speakers: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tamar Garb, Kelly-Christina Grant
Chaired by Dr. Mark Godfrey
This session delves into Marshall’s engagement with the different traditions, genres, and conventions of Western painting— from Giotto and Théodore Géricault to Piet Mondrian and Gerhard Richter. Focusing on how he has transformed these traditions for his own use, the conversation will explore how Marshall has approached composition, painterly techniques, and materials to, in his words, ‘establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally Black and beautiful’.
Kerry James Marshall and Portraiture: Blackness, Whiteness and the Abstraction of Colour
Presented by Dr. Tamar Garb
Portraiture is premised on the picturing of likeness. But this is as much a conceit as it is an impossibility. Portraits may substitute for a named individual, but they perform
their function due to a suspension of disbelief or an embrace of conventions and norms. Not least of these is the question of ‘colour’, whether racialised or naturalised.
Together with inherited codes of posing and performing a ‘self’ or a ‘subject’, portraits produce the identities they pretend to depict. Kerry James Marshall plays with the
assumptions and disruptions that an engagement with the genre entails, constructing a cast of characters that come to stand in for their historical personae. Whether compensating for past erasure or censure, correcting received narratives and norms, or staging race as an effect of surface manipulation and melanation, he makes us question what it is that we see. ‘Blackness’, ‘Whiteness’ and all shades of grey, as historically determining and deadly as they are, can also be seen as abstractions. Portraiture provides the site for their simultaneous enactment and denaturalisation, revealing them as the constructs they are.
Pictures in the Grand Tradition: Kerry James Marshall, French Painting and His Legacy on the Contemporary Black Diaspora Art Scene in Paris
Presented by Kelly-Christina Grant
This paper examines Kerry James Marshall’s engagement with the histories of painting’s conventions and genres in relation to the French canon, tracing his influences from artists such as Fragonard, David, Ingres and Seurat to his impact on the Black diaspora contemporary art scene. Marshall’s dialogue with French painting functions as both homage and critical intervention. He reworks the Western art historical canon to center Black subjects traditionally excluded from its narratives while also pioneering a postcolonial approach to the history of art. This paper also considers how Marshall’s practice has, in turn, inspired a younger generation of Black diaspora artists on the French scene who engage with his work and pursue his mission through the lens of postcolonial theory. Kelly-Christina argues that these artists interrogate Black diaspora history and the Eurocentric structure of French art institutions, drawing on Marshall’s visual strategies of representation to counter histories.
Materiality Matters
Presented by Dr. Mark Godfrey
Over the next two days, we will be discussing many of the histories that Kerry James Marshall addresses and rethinks in his works. Of course, Marshall spends considerable time reading and researching and speaking about these matters, but most of his time in the studio is spent planning compositions, making drawings, deciding how to work with materials, and what to do with colours. This talk will focus on this aspect of his practice and on the stranger parts of his work. As the curator of the exhibition, Mark spent considerable time researching Marshall’s ideas, but since the show opened, many additional details of the works have struck him: brush strokes, collaged papers, drips, colour chords, deliberately ‘unfinished’ parts of paintings. What does attending to these details do to a wider discussion of Marshall’s practice?
______________________________________________________________________
This program is associated with the Getty Research Institute's African American Art History Initiative, which focuses on the history, practices, and cultural legacies of artists of African American and African diasporic heritage.
https://www.getty.edu/projects/african-american-art-history-initiative/
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs.
https://www.getty.edu/research-institute/
