The UCLA Department of Art History, with the collaboration of the UCLA Department of Art, is proud to announce:
A 2024-2025 UCLA Art Council Distinguished Scholar Lecture
Mark Godfrey
“Kerry James Marshall: The Histories”
Monday, December 9, 4 PM
Laureate Room, Luskin Conference Center, UCLA
In advance of his organizing the major UK retrospective survey of the painter Kerry James Marshall, Godfrey will at UCLA share his work on Marshall with audiences for the first time. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories will run at the Royal Academy of Arts, September 2025 -January 2026, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d’art moderne de Paris.
On the lecture:
“The ‘histories’ in play in Kerry James Marshall’s practice are multiple and intertwining. He thinks about the histories of painting’s conventions and genres. He considers the histories of materials that painters have used for centuries, like egg tempera, and those they have not, like glitter; the histories of perspective and flatness, of brushwork and gesture. While he is most known for confronting the exclusion of Black subjects in the history of figurative painting and in modernist abstraction, in several projects he has looked back at the history of the inclusion of Black figures, and at earlier attempts to forge a Black aesthetic, and at the histories of Afrofuturism. Marshall occasionally touches on personal history, more frequently attends to individuals who have been forgotten, and increasingly provokes questions about history that few others wish to confront. Marshall has worked on all these levels since 1980 because he recognizes this is what it takes for ambitious work to be taken seriously and exhibited, because he regrets the way several Black artists before him have been romanticized precisely because of their disconnection from art history, and because he wagers that his layered approach to history will mean his work is taken seriously for centuries to come.”
Mark Godfrey is an art historian, critic, and curator. He has established and runs New Curators, a paid one-year curating course based in London for international students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. His Ph.D. from University College London became his first book, Abstraction and the Holocaust, published by Yale University Press in 2007. From 2002-2007 he taught Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. From 2007 to 2021 he was Senior Curator at Tate Modern where his exhibitions included Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Turbine Hall commissions by Abraham Cruzvillegas and Anicka Yi, and retrospectives of Sigmar Polke, Franz West, Alighiero Boetti, Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter, Roni Horn, and Francis Alÿs. He was one of the curatorial team for the Philip Guston Now retrospective. During this period, outside of Tate Modern, he curated major exhibitions by Christopher Williams, David Hammons, and R.H. Quaytman, and published texts on artists including Fischli & Weiss, Pierre Huyghe, Tacita Dean, Anri Sala, Thomas Demand, and James Welling. Since leaving Tate, he has curated Laura Owens and Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, Jacqueline Humphries’s survey at the Wexner, Nicole Eisenman: What Happened at the Whitechapel, and the recent Pino Pascali retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Publications in the past year include texts on Oscar Murillo, Nairy Baghramian, and Arthur Simms, and he has texts in forthcoming catalogues on Jack Whitten and Matthew Barney.