At London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Kerry James Marshall’s monumental paintings challenge the Western art-historical canon while expanding conversations around visibility, authorship, and who gets represented.

As part of my 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour series for Tarik Talk, I visited the Royal Academy of Arts in London, an institution that has long been central to conversations about art, power, and representation.

The Royal Academy carries a certain weight. You feel it the moment you walk inside. The building is grand, formal, and deeply connected to art history. But what makes the institution particularly interesting today is the way it continues to create space for contemporary artists whose work challenges and expands that history.

Kerry James Marshall’s paintings feel especially powerful within this setting.

His works are bold, expansive, and uncompromising. Scale immediately becomes part of the experience. These paintings take up space—not only physically, but historically.

Marshall’s use of deep, rich Black figures commands attention, asserting visibility within a Western painting tradition that has historically excluded or marginalized Black subjects.

As you move through the exhibition, the complexity of the work begins to unfold.

The paintings reference everyday life, interiors, landscapes, leisure, intimacy, and human relationships. Beneath these scenes, however, is a much larger conversation about art history, representation, identity, and power.

Marshall engages directly with Western painting traditions. References to classical composition, Renaissance perspective, modernist abstraction, pattern, and symbolism appear throughout his work, but they are reworked, recentered, and reimagined.

The paintings can feel familiar and disruptive at the same time.

What stood out to me most was their confidence.

There is no sense of explanation or apology. These paintings do not ask permission to exist within an institution like the Royal Academy. They claim their place within it.

That assertion feels especially significant here.

The exhibition gives the works room to breathe, allowing you to spend time with individual paintings and notice their surfaces, symbols, patterns, text, figures, and carefully constructed compositions.

The longer you look, the more they reveal.

Being in London—and specifically inside the Royal Academy—adds another layer to the experience. This is an institution deeply connected to the established canon of Western art history.

Marshall’s presence here feels simultaneously like a continuation of that history and a correction to it.

His paintings expand the story of what art history can look like, whose lives are represented within it, and who gets to participate in constructing that narrative.

By the time you leave the exhibition, you begin noticing absence and presence differently. You become more aware of who appears on museum walls, who does not, and how those decisions influence our understanding of culture and history.

This exhibition is not simply about painting.

It is about visibility, authorship, representation, and the possibility of rewriting established narratives from within the institutions that helped shape them.

This visit to the Royal Academy of Arts is part of 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour, a Tarik Talk series exploring museums, galleries, exhibitions, artists, and cultural spaces across Europe.