“For me,” he said in his MCA Chicago lecture, “the thing that has the greatest transformative capacity in the art world today, in terms of what people expect to see when they go to the art museum, is a painting that has a black figure in it, because 95 percent of all the other paintings you see are going to have white figures in them. The whole history of representation is built on the representation of white folks. Now, all of that stuff is good, so you have to figure out how to get good like that, and then get in there on the terms that are relevant for now.” Marshall has done this “from the ground up,” as Metropolitan Museum curator Ian Alteveer put it, working through historical styles and genres, including Rococo love scenes, large-scale history paintings, and Impressionist plein air fetes.
http://www.artnews.com/2016/03/02/the-painter-of-modern-life-kerry-james-marshall-aims-to-get-more-images-of-black-figures-into-museums/?singlepage=1

http://hyperallergic.com/310477/how-kerry-james-marshall-rewrites-art-history/
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.35534.html#biography