African Intermediaries in the Slave Trade: Kerry James Marshall’s New Histories
‘These aren’t difficult things to interpret’ … Marshall at his Royal Academy exhibition. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
In his landmark exhibition The Histories at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Kerry James Marshall has opened a new chapter in his practice—one that refuses to look away from some of the most difficult truths of the past. Known for filling the absences of Black presence in Western art, Marshall now confronts another silence: the role of African intermediaries in the transatlantic slave trade.
“Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister”, 2023. Image courtesy David Zwirner, London.
In works such as Haul (2025), Outbound (2025), and Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister (2023), Marshall reimagines moments rarely pictured in the visual record. Instead of focusing solely on European ships or markets across the Atlantic, he paints the crucial—and deeply unsettling—scenes that unfolded on African shores. Figures paddle canoes laden with captives toward waiting vessels. Sacks of goods, teacups, clocks, and empty frames stand in as symbols of exchange, showing what was gained in return for what was lost.
Kerry James Marshall, "Haul", 2025. Image courtesy of David Zwirner, London.
By doing so, Marshall places African participants squarely in the visual field. His choice is not about assigning equal blame, but about forcing us to confront the complexity of history. Europeans financed and fueled the trade, but without African middlemen, its scale could not have reached such catastrophic proportions. Marshall insists on painting that reality into view.
What makes these canvases so powerful is their refusal of abstraction. The figures are monumental, dark, undeniable. The compositions recall the grandeur of European history painting, but instead of kings and generals, we see the fraught entanglements of Africans caught between survival, power, and betrayal.
Marshall’s The Histories is not a comfortable exhibition. But it is one of the most urgent. By turning his brush toward the stories we struggle to face, he transforms history painting from a genre of glorification into a tool of reckoning. His work reminds us that the past is not singular or simple—it is layered, contradictory, still pressing on the present, and impossible to ignore.
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