Miles Greenberg explores Black representation, ritual and affect alongside Kerry James Marshall’s ‘The Histories’

At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Kerry James Marshall’s work becomes the starting point for a new live encounter with the body. On October 3rd, 2026, performance artist and sculptor Miles Greenberg will stage Douze études académiques, a long-duration performance held throughout the day alongside Marshall’s major exhibition The Histories.

Kerry James Marshall and the history of Black representation

On view from September 18th, 2026, to January 24th, 2027, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories brings together around 70 works spanning more than four decades, including eight paintings created specifically for the exhibition.

Marshall’s monumental paintings place Black figures at the centre of scenes drawn from art history, popular culture and everyday life. His visual language moves through Western painting, nineteenth-century French art, Afrofuturism, comics and science fiction, while confronting histories of displacement, slavery and Black political struggle.

Several works examine how Black identities and histories survive when conventional archives fail to preserve them. Imagined portraits of figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman ask how a likeness might exist without an established visual record. The Academy (2012), meanwhile, depicts a male life-drawing model raising his fist in a Black Power salute, placing questions of representation inside the institutional space of the art academy.

The exhibition also includes Wake (2003), a cumulative sculpture whose collection of medallions grows with each exhibition, alongside eight new paintings exploring lesser-known episodes in African history and the transatlantic slave trade.

When painting becomes a living body

Within this landscape of representation and Black history, Greenberg’s Douze études académiques takes shape. Staged in the Salle Matisse, the performance will run continuously throughout October 3rd, allowing visitors to encounter it alongside Marshall’s paintings.

Drawing on Marshall’s visual vocabulary surrounding the Black figure, Greenberg shifts attention from representation towards tension, emotion, presence and affect. Some performers, who are also singers, will intermittently introduce songs, texts and prayers connected to Marshall’s references and inspirations, adding voice, ritual and sound to the gallery.

Slowness, ritual and the poetics of the body

Born in Montreal in 1997, Greenberg works across performance and sculpture, often creating expansive environments where the human body becomes sculptural material. Duration, repetition and ritualised gestures are central to his practice, inviting close attention to subtle physical and emotional shifts.

The approach creates a compelling dialogue with The Histories. Marshall places Black bodies within and against established narratives of art history; Greenberg works directly with the living body, exploring sensations and relationships that resist capture in a static image.

Douze études académiques extends these questions into real time, replacing the stillness of painting with bodies that breathe, move and vocalise before the audience.