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: Paul Ninson, Dr. Igor Simões, Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
Chaired by Afua Hirsch
Marshall has a long history of engagement with African history, knowledge, and the formation of syncretic religions across the diaspora. Focusing on the series of eight new paintings debuting at the Royal Academy, the conversation will grapple with the complex history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
Palaces of Memory: Reframing African Histories through Art and Archives
Presented by Paul Ninson
Drawing on Kerry James Marshall’s interventions into Western art history, this talk explores how African institutions like Ahenfie and Awo Institute are reimagining museums and archives as “palaces of memory” — spaces where African voices reclaim the histories of slavery and colonialism.
Paths for an Amefrican Art
Presented by Dr. Igor Simões
Since the Renaissance, the history of art has been contemporary with the greatest process of dehumanization ever experienced by humanity. Brazil stands at the center of this movement, as the main destination of the Atlantic slave trade and the largest Black nation outside the African continent.
In eighteenth-century Europe, art academies became strategic spaces for observing the intersection between image and trauma. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, was one of the main protagonists in the production of these images, marked by salt and paint.
There lies the foundation of a pictorial tradition that resonates in the recent works of Kerry James Marshall, not only in their formal and procedural elements. The artist and his work are, finally, presented under the concept of Amefrican art.
Circa 1830: “You could say that I’m a lot like David Walker.”
Presented by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
Although the painting titled ‘Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker’ (ca. 1830), both branded and opened the Kerry James Marshall retrospective exhibition of 2014, eliciting from the artist a statement of his supposed similarity to his subject, it was painted in 2009, and we can trace Marshall’s artistic interest in Walker to as early as 2007. For, in that year, as Nikita Sena Quarshie astutely observes, Marshall’s comic strip ‘Dailies’ bends the form’s elasticity to ironic effect by…inserting advertisements. One promotes T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “a real freedom fighter”, with an image of David Walker.
‘It is a striking coincidence’, observed David Brion Davis, when reflecting on ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought’, ‘that both the British and American antislavery movements had come to a crucial turning point by 1830’. Focussing, then, on that date, that significant, yet neglected, turning point, highlighted by Marshall in the title of his painting, this presentation asks, ‘How can ‘Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker (ca. 1830)’ help to prepare British and American society for the abolitionist bicentenary commemoration that awaits us in the year 2030?
______________________________________________________________________
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. Its library and special collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Research Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.
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: Paul Ninson, Dr. Igor Simões, Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
Chaired by Afua Hirsch
Marshall has a long history of engagement with African history, knowledge, and the formation of syncretic religions across the diaspora. Focusing on the series of eight new paintings debuting at the Royal Academy, the conversation will grapple with the complex history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
Palaces of Memory: Reframing African Histories through Art and Archives
Presented by Paul Ninson
Drawing on Kerry James Marshall’s interventions into Western art history, this talk explores how African institutions like Ahenfie and Awo Institute are reimagining museums and archives as “palaces of memory” — spaces where African voices reclaim the histories of slavery and colonialism.
Paths for an Amefrican Art
Presented by Dr. Igor Simões
Since the Renaissance, the history of art has been contemporary with the greatest process of dehumanization ever experienced by humanity. Brazil stands at the center of this movement, as the main destination of the Atlantic slave trade and the largest Black nation outside the African continent.
In eighteenth-century Europe, art academies became strategic spaces for observing the intersection between image and trauma. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, was one of the main protagonists in the production of these images, marked by salt and paint.
There lies the foundation of a pictorial tradition that resonates in the recent works of Kerry James Marshall, not only in their formal and procedural elements. The artist and his work are, finally, presented under the concept of Amefrican art.
Circa 1830: “You could say that I’m a lot like David Walker.”
Presented by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
Although the painting titled ‘Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker’ (ca. 1830), both branded and opened the Kerry James Marshall retrospective exhibition of 2014, eliciting from the artist a statement of his supposed similarity to his subject, it was painted in 2009, and we can trace Marshall’s artistic interest in Walker to as early as 2007. For, in that year, as Nikita Sena Quarshie astutely observes, Marshall’s comic strip ‘Dailies’ bends the form’s elasticity to ironic effect by…inserting advertisements. One promotes T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “a real freedom fighter”, with an image of David Walker.
‘It is a striking coincidence’, observed David Brion Davis, when reflecting on ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought’, ‘that both the British and American antislavery movements had come to a crucial turning point by 1830’. Focussing, then, on that date, that significant, yet neglected, turning point, highlighted by Marshall in the title of his painting, this presentation asks, ‘How can ‘Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker (ca. 1830)’ help to prepare British and American society for the abolitionist bicentenary commemoration that awaits us in the year 2030?
______________________________________________________________________
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. Its library and special collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public. The Research Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.
https://www.getty.edu/research-institute/
