Image: Kerry James Marshall, Past Times, 1997. Private collection, courtesy Gagosian. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London. Photo: Jack Hems
The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris will hold a talk on the representation of Black figures in the work of Kerry James Marshall on Thursday 5 November 2026, from 19:00 to 20:30 in its Salle Matisse. Admission is free, with places limited and booking required.
Since the 1980s, Marshall has engaged with the traditions, genres and conventions of Western painting while making the Black figure central to his work. According to the museum, the session will look at how Black figures have been represented in Western art, at the development of Black figurative painting, and at the strategies Marshall has used to rethink and renew the canons of art history.
The speakers are the art historian Anne Lafont and the curator Denise Murrell. Lafont, a director of studies at the EHESS, works on art of the Black Atlantic; she published L'art et la Race in 2019, took part in the Musée d'Orsay exhibition "Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse", and co-edited L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées (2022) with François-Xavier Fauvelle. Murrell is the Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she organised "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism" in 2024. She earlier curated "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery and co-curated its Paris version at the Musée d'Orsay, and in 2026 is guest curator of "Matisse and Martinique: Portraits and Poetry" at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The discussion will be moderated by Kelly-Christina Grant, scientific adviser to the museum's exhibition "Kerry James Marshall: The Histories". A doctoral candidate at Université Paris Nanterre, Grant is completing a thesis on the Harlem Renaissance artist Loïs Mailou Jones, and her master's research examined time, culture and history in Marshall's figurative painting.
The talk is part of a wider cycle of events organised by the museum.
