Who Gets to Be Seen? Kerry James Marshall at Kunsthaus Zürich
When I landed in Zurich, it was one of those hot July mornings that instantly puts you in holiday mode, ideally resulting in flip-flops on by the lake. But at the time I had a different goal.
My sister met me at HB, Zurich’s central train station. She had her hand behind her back like a child. “For you,” she said joyfully, and gave me a gift bag. I laughed and took out a tiny canvas, a paintbrush, a tube of baby-pink acrylic and a little container of gold dust.
“I was trying to find something that you don’t yet have,” she explained. It was a thoughtful gesture, and I promised to use the pink and gold in the painting I had just started. Little did she know that, later that day, we were about to see an artist who would give me a whole new way of thinking about these colours.
We walked to the Kunsthaus Zürich, me carrying a backpack with a bottle of red wine I grabbed at duty-free, cheese from the Lithuanian folk fair, and other local delights. The sun was too intense, and we set down for a coffee break somewhere in the old town, right on the hill.
An hour here and there, and we finally made it to the Kunsthaus.
Inside was “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories”. Many of us may not know his name yet. He is not the kind of household name whose paintings end up on mugs and tote bags from Tallinn to Lisbon.
For more than four decades, Kerry James Marshall has been painting Black lives with such scale, beauty and seriousness that it becomes impossible to look away. Looking back on the exhibition now, I realise how powerfully his art captivated me (and my sister) while also teaching me to look more carefully at who gets seen, remembered and placed at the centre of Western art history.
Apparently, this was his biggest show outside the US. I had to come to look.
I didn’t know yet that I would stand in front of those artworks and see both beauty and pain underneath.
That I would think about who gets to be an insider and who is left at the margins. That I would think about what it means to make something in a room full of other people’s truths.
That I would think about how some people have to prove their right to belong, while others simply move through the world assuming it was built for them.
That I would think about the ways people are expected to bend, adapt and assimilate before they are allowed to belong and how their worth can still be measured by standards set up by people who have been dead for centuries.
But that’s what happened.
I stand there looking at this black ship called “Wake” (2003–2025), sitting on its platform, heavy with all those tiny medallions picturing Black faces. It’s the artist’s attempt to trace the millions of Black lives swallowed by the Middle Passage – identities erased by the slave trade, now brought back into the light.
It’s brutal. I look closely. I see eyes of the individual human beings inside a Western history that tried to turn them into nameless cargo. It’s heartbreaking. Because I can’t look at those faces without feeling the ghost of every single life left behind in the water. Or every single life destroyed throughout slavery.
Not all of Marshall’s artworks push the viewer directly into history’s violence. There’s room for beauty, desire, for pride. I stood in front of Vignette #14 (La La La) looking at a different mood. The whole thing is surrounded by baby pink – soft and sweet. There are sparkles and glitter – the image shimmers.
It feels romantic, like a teenage fantasy. No obvious pain or suffering, just a loved-up couple in flowery grass. And I love that about it. Marshall allows Black people to exist inside all this sweetness and decoration, to be flirtatious, sentimental.
Although the series of these vignettes is only light-hearted on the surface. It’s also a protest against slavery. The description on the wall calls these paintings the paintings of resistance. “Breeding”, not marriage, was encouraged by some slave owners as a way of increasing their workforce.
And then there are the people who did manage to claim power. The people whose names survived. The people who became history.
I stood in front of “Still Life with Wedding Portrait”, Marshall’s imagined portrait of Harriet Tubman and her first husband, John. Tubman was born into slavery, escaped to freedom in 1849 and then risked her own life again and again coming back to the South to help other enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad.
They both – Tubman and her husband – look straight at me. She is dressed beautifully, almost formally, with that enormous white bow at her neck. I keep thinking about the strange fact that I now know her name. She became a legend and a heroine, on whose shoulders people stand today.
And then I googled the money. This painting sold at Christie's for over $5 million in 2017. The woman, whose humanity was once denied, is now the subject of a painting worth millions.
And probably that is part of Marshall's point. Who gets to be important? Who gets their portrait painted? Whose wedding is worth remembering? Whose face deserves to hang on a wall?
For centuries, the grand portraits of Western art belonged to kings, queens, aristocrats, merchants, generals – people who had the money or the power to commission themselves into history, and call their images art. To this day, they look out from enormous canvases with the confidence of people who knew they belonged there.
Marshall puts Harriet Tubman in that room.
Maybe that is what I take away from this exhibition. Not simply that Black people have been left out of the story, but that they have always been there, making lives, loving people, fighting, dreaming, decorating their homes, getting married, becoming powerful, becoming legends.
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If you’re in Zurich, go and see it before it closes. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is at Kunsthaus Zürich until 16 August 2026. Not many days left to stand in front of these artworks and look properly.
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