“Kerry James Marshall” at The Met Breuer

Marking the artist’s largest museum exhibition to date, this retrospective of paintings by Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham, Alabama) spans the artist’s remarkable thirty-five-year career, revealing the complex and compelling creative output of one of today’s most important living artists.

Marshall is a history painter whose work reflects and challenges the time and culture he inhabits. Driven by an examination of the historical dearth and relatively recent appearance of the black figure in the history of Western painting, he is immersed in the past and present of painting—particularly the century-long conflict between figuration and abstraction. He is also committed to a vision of American history that represents the narratives—triumphs and failures both—of individual African Americans as well as the concept of blackness as a whole. In the grand scale of the Old Masters, Marshall creates works that engage with themes of visibility and invisibility, portraiture and self-portraiture, religious iconography, the politics of Pan-Africanism and black militancy, and the ethics of painting.

It is co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it debuts in April 2016; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.