Nearly all the new paintings in ‘The Histories’ are set in Africa, a continent Marshall has never visited but which looms large in the Black American imagination. He has long looked askance at Afrocentrism, or, as he put it, ‘this crazy idea that before white people came we were like Adam and Eve.’ Vignette (2003; above) depicts a Black man and a Black woman running naked through tall grass among bluebirds and butterflies – an idyll belied by a wedge of sidewalk in the corner. ‘That’s not Eden,’ he told me, laughing mischeviously. ‘It’s Washington Park, down by the University of Chicago.’ To him, idealising the past is a surefire way to misunderstand the present and foreclose the future. ‘If you just look at the world around where you grow up, that’ll disabuse you of any romantic ideas about the possibilities that are present in any time, place, or philosophy,’ he said. ‘I’m so not a utopian it’s not even funny.’
