Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s leading painters, is debuting a new set of paintings that look at the involvement of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade as part of his recently opened survey at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Coming toward the end of the exhibition, the works are included in a section titled “Africa Revisited.” For these paintings, Marshall looks at “challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists,” according to a wall label. In an interview with the Guardian, Marshall said these topics are often ignored “[b]ecause they don’t fit the narrative of white people evil, black people good. It doesn’t fit.”
One such painting is Abduction of Olaudah and His sister (2023), which takes as its subject 18th-century writer Olaudah Equiano who was kidnapped from Nigeria when he was 11. His 1789 memoir The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano details that “the children in his village were already used to being on the lookout for kidnappers while the adults were away,” according to the Royal Academy.
In the Guardian interview, Marshall takes this condemnation further, stating that Equiano passed through a complex network in which he “didn’t see a white man until he got on the boat. That’s the slave trade too. It’s not just the boats. It’s not just the trip across the Atlantic. It’s everyday people who wanted some value from whatever was transpiring during the slave trade, people who participated as freelancers to get what they could.”
Marshall had first made paintings about the Middle Passage in the early ’90s, and five of those works are on view earlier in the exhibition. “It is a history understood in fragments, and accordingly … Marshall composes paintings with disparate images, motifs and textures,” according to the exhibition wall text.
In the latest paintings, Marshall presents “confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange,” according to the wall text. Three works that hang on one—Outbound, Haul, and Cove (all 2025)—show Black people taking Black captives in canoes out to slave ships, sailing back with their spoils, and returning to shore in celebration.
“It’s easier to create boogeymen and scapegoats,” Marshall told the Guardian. “And it’s also easy not to take responsibility for being a part of any of that. It’s always somebody else. I think this is critical: in all of the works I do, black people have agency.”
