Kerry James Marshall. The Histories

Ticket valid for 15 minutes, untimed visit. Free for under-18s, jobseekers, and recipients of state welfare benefits. Important: reduced rates are only available at the museum ticket desks. The museum is closed on Mondays, December 25th, and January 1st.

Kerry James Marshall The Histories

*From September 18, 2026 to January 24, 2027

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents the first exhibition in France dedicated to the American artist Kerry James Marshall, born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. Organised at the initiative of the Royal Academy of Arts, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, it brings together 70 works, including 8 brand-new paintings created for the exhibition. Considered one of the most influential contemporary painters, Kerry James Marshall creates monumental compositions where the daily lives of Black individuals attain an epic dimension. By embedding these figures within art-history archetypes from which they were previously excluded, he questions their absence and asserts their rightful place in history. His work evokes the forced crossing of enslaved Africans to the Americas, the legacy of African American mobilisations from the civil rights movement to Black Power, without resorting to the direct depiction of violence. Nourished by history, 19th-century French painting, contemporary culture, afrofuturism, and science fiction, his practice spans painting, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition traces more than four decades of creation through series of works drawn from public and private collections across Europe and North America. The chrono-thematic journey is divided into twelve sections produced from 1980 to the present day.

• Painting narratives