Article by Floriana Savino
Chasing stories rather than History, the large canvases with their intense and multifaceted pictorial spaces by Kerry James Marshall (Birmingham, Alabama, 1955) have arrived at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Switzerland.
It is 2022 when, taking a small step back in time, for the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, the internationally renowned American artist brings to life the art intervention Thinking Historically in the Present. In that title, one can ultimately find all the coordinates of an artistic practice wholly devoted to the most watchful reflection on the state of things — past and present.
As Marshall confided in the interview given to Emily Watlington for Art in America in 2023: I define myself as a history painter. […] I look at history and try to bring out connections that people don’t automatically grasp. […] I want to undermine this tendency to project a certain image of who we are onto the world and to question our relationship with struggle and with the history of slavery. Nothing is as simple as it seems. […] People of all kinds have profited from imperialist, colonialist, and commercial transactions. […] Today we have the NBA and all those basketball players flying across the court and dunking: all of this happens in the wake of that history. History is not always tragic, but it is always complex. My paintings address history in its most complex form. No one will come out unscathed.
In this spirit, the Swiss solo exhibition The Histories fits within the same line of research, channeling all the energy and urgency of reading the events of time courageously against the grain into the possibility of evoking «stories contained within History».
In a seminal essay on African American history, scholar Jonathan Scott Holloway asks himself and the reader, repeatedly: «Who deserves to have a History, a history of their own?». Pushing the inherently amorphous matter of art toward a direct and lucid engagement with the context, the struggles, and the burdens that accompany the millennia-long journey of humankind, Kerry James Marshall restores in paint the memories and the layered weight of feeling Black in the face of the self-referential imaginary woven for centuries by the ancient conquistadores and the milk-white colonizers.
«I try to make the black colors I use as complex as any other color on the palette» — this is perhaps the most candid manifesto of his intention to restore the image of a rich and varied multiplicity of Black presences that cannot be reduced to a reductive, and equally stereotyped, vision filtered through a simplistic dualism: the good Blacks, the bad whites.
Within the fabric of what was the centuries-long and criminal adventure of the great European powers in their conquest of parts of America, Africa, and Asia, Marshall’s artistic restitutions draw attention to the singular, rare but nonetheless real choices of those who, within the same community of the enslaved and exploited, chose to become willing instruments of exploitation — leading, in turn, their own campaigns and voyages to collect goods and slaves to be sold on the European market (Haul, 2025).
Refusing any attempt to read history and its most sorrowful and widespread manipulation through the lens of an anaesthetising, unified, and pacified memory, the histories of Kerry James Marshall shine with the vitality and the dense color of events that, in the specificity of the everyday, find no consolation in the binary image of angels or demons — aiming instead at the unmitigated accountability of each individual’s particular actions in the face of singular circumstances, which only in retrospect will constitute what we loosely call History. To the Beauty Queen of a remarkable 2014 painting, as much as to the female figure softened by the sight of a beautiful and «decidedly bourgeois» domestic swimming pool, Marshall seems to ask: «Where were you in the days of dispossession, violence, and colonial theft? And had you been there, which side would you have chosen?»
He further clarified to Emily Watlington:
As far as I’m concerned, I simply do what I think is necessary. I take the pictures I want. I always have. If they then have an impact on people, all the better. […] I make works because I want to see what they look like. I make works because I want to understand how images work, how I can best use those mechanisms to do what I think is necessary. I don’t limit myself to doing just one thing, because one thing never covers all the angles. When Jackson Pollock reached the end of the road, when he could no longer imagine himself [making] those drip paintings, he crashed the car. Mark Rothko too [took his own life]. You can’t make ephemeral rectangles your whole life.
And then added:
You can show how much you care about the representation of Black people by not treating them like modelling clay to be shaped at will. If “exquisite” has meaning, it means doing things well, with elegance. I won’t create monsters; that would be too easy.
