‘If you say Black, you should see Black’

Photo: Untitled (Porch Deck), 2014, Acrylic on PVC panel. 180.3 x 149.9 cm. Kravis Collection. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

Daniel Nelson

If you say Black you should see Black, US artist Kerry James Marshall has said. And in his big exhibition at the Royal Academy he walks the talk.

The subject of his 70+ paintings are Black people. Very black people. He ignores the many hues and shades of Africa and the diaspora.

He also likes to go Big.

The overall effect is a big, black, blockbuster of a show, that is also big on ambition, talent, range, humour, history, erudition and politics. The scale fits the grandiloquent rooms of the gallery.

He bigs up contemporary Black lives, the slave trade (including African traders), heroes and sheroes, the discipline of art training, Africanised European genres, the homes of his middle-class family and friends and the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

For years, Marshall studied Art, where the presence of Africans is notable for its absence. Filling that absence is the big theme in this exhibition, whether by playfully painting Black portraits on a black background, subverting classical artworks, showing rarely painted scenes or focussing on historic figures who were not painted in their lifetimes.

The people he puts in the spotlight, known and unknown, include William Tucker, the first person of African origin born in America, abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman, slave rebellion leader Ned Turner, Julian Carlton, the Barbadian servant who set fire to architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, murdering seven people, freed slave and writer Olaudah Equiano and Ralph Ellison, whose book, Invisible Man, obviously influenced Marshall. These and others who make Marshall’s pantheon should offer an additional attraction to anyone willing to learn about African American history.

I say “additional” because the paintings alone should be enough to attract the visitors who seem not to be flocking to the exhibition, partly because Marshall is not a big name here. 

That’s a pity.It’s also a pity that so many Black US and European artists continue to feel the pressing need to fill the gap left by their invisibility in art. 

For now, at least, non-Blacks have the double pleasure of being prodded out of complacency and of enjoying work of such vitality and thought.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, £23; under-16s free, 16-25-year-olds half-price, is at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD until 18 January