The History of Afrocentrism, Black Nationalism, Garveyism in Kerry James Marshall’s Practice

Описание: The symposium ‘Kerry James Marshall: Conversations’ was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on November 13–14, 2025. Organized in partnership with Getty and Black Curatorial.

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Speakers: Dr. Sampada Aranke, Nydia Swaby, Dr. Aleema Gray
Chaired by Nikita Sena Quarshie

Kerry James Marshall has engaged deeply with the histories of Garveyism and Black Nationalism. Looking back at ‘Who’s Afraid of Red Black and Green’, Marshall’s 2012 show at Seccession, Vienna, this conversation will explore how the artist has sought to ‘link the ideas and goals of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements and the abstract color field painting of Barnett Newman’. The session will also build on the speakers’ and Marshall’s exploration of counter-archives, examining different approaches to drawing out contested histories that might otherwise be excluded from popular discourse.

Blackouts: Kerry James Marshall’s ‘Black Painting’ (2003-2006)
Presented by Dr. Sampada Aranke

In a 2014 interview with curator Dieter Roelstraete, Kerry James Marshall asks a question central to his use of the color black: ‘How do you render an object with real volume without destroying the depth of its blackness?’ In a provisional answer, he offers up his dedication to visualizing density: ‘I’m always looking to create mass...’ In this paper, Sampada takes up the notion of “mass” as Marshall’s signature visual device. “Mass” deploys both the formal and the social, bringing together an attention to the chromatic weight of the color black as well as its dynamic social force vis-à-vis “the masses.” Paying close attention to ‘Black Painting’ (2003-2006), Sampada will think through Marshall’s uptake of the moment before Chicago Panther Fred Hampton’s gruesome 1969 murder in order to consider the ways that Marshall challenges the viewer to see mass in a complete blackout.

Kerry James Marshall, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and the Counter-Archives of Pan-African Feminism
Presented by Dr. Nydia Swaby

This presentation brings Kerry James Marshall’s engagement with Garveyism and Pan-Africanist aesthetics into conversation with the life and activism of Amy Ashwood Garvey. Marshall has described his practice as a ‘counter-archive,’ one that insists on the presence of Black histories within the Western art canon. His ‘commitment to Black figure representation’ functions as a corrective to archival erasure, re-inscribing Black presence in spaces where absence has been the norm. Ashwood Garvey, co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and an original director of the Black Star Line, was an important yet often overlooked Pan-African feminist. Through political organising, publishing, and cultural production, she assembled dispersed histories of Black life.

From the Afro Women’s Centre in London to her networks in the United States, West Africa, and the Caribbean, she created archives of solidarity that connected Pan-Africanists across the diaspora. Reading Marshall’s practice alongside Ashwood Garvey’s initiatives highlights how Black women’s organising, writing, and cultural work not only preserved fragmented histories but also generated new diasporic spaces and forms of collective memory. Together, their counter-archives underscore that archives are not passive repositories, but contested sites of power, and that aesthetic practices, whether in paint, print, or performance, can reconfigure what histories are made visible, remembered, and claimed.

We Have Done the Job – What Shall We Do with the Tools?
Presented by Dr. Aleema Gray

How might we mobilise historical narratives as active tools for making, imagining, and doing? Taking Haile Selassie I’s 1941 speech as a starting point, this presentation frames Kerry James Marshall’s practice as a toolkit: one that thinks critically about the politics of Black visibility and invisibility, and the institutional architectures that delimit historical memory. Drawing on HOUSE OF DREAD’s anti-disciplinary approaches to the production of knowledge, Aleema will reflect on how the artistic method itself becomes a form of historical labour. Rather than dwelling on absence or erasure, the focus is on adaptation and activation: how tools of representation, refusal, and imagination can be carried forward, sharpened, and applied within institutions, communities, and counter-archives. Marshall’s work enables us to bridge history and practice — to close the gap between what has been recorded and what we actively make, imagine, and sustain.

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Getty African American Art History Initiative:
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