‘Kerry James Marshall: History painter’ by Katie White
2026
Michael Armitage, Kerry James Marshall, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Gerhard Richter are among the inaugural Time100 Art list of the Most Influential People in Art. Also included are David Zwirner and gallery architect Annabelle Selldorf.
If old-fashioned-seeming genres like history painting and portraiture have begun to feel fresh again, you can thank Kerry James Marshall. Growing up, Marshall was acutely aware of the absence of Black artists and subjects in visual culture ranging from comic books to art museums. His paintings, which riff on masterpieces that depicted daily life from Velázquez to Manet, offer a correction to such erasures. Set in barbershops, parks, and amusement parks, and populated by figures with deep Black skin, his images illustrate how artists can adapt the tools and concepts of art history to offer fresh insight into contemporary life. “You have to demonstrate that black is richer than it appears to be, that it is not just darkness but a color,” Marshall has said. In 2018, his painting Past Times (1997) sold at auction for a record-breaking $21.1 million. That painting recently appeared in the largest presentation of Marshall’s work outside of the U.S., a major survey that traveled from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to Kunsthaus Zürich, and this fall heads to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. More is on the horizon: in 2027, the Print Center New York will open the first comprehensive exhibition of his lesser-known print practice.
Read more at Time.