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" At a certain point, you have to decide whether you'd be satisfied always acknowledging the beauty and the greatness of what other people create or if you want to be in the same arena. "

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" When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent. "

Kerry James Marshall

Picture

Art

Beauty

" I don't want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I'm really interested in. "

" What you're trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody knows you, or somebody's a friend, or somebody's being generous to you. "

" There's this idea that many of the attitudes and personality developments in black folks in the diaspora are a consequence of this unresolved trauma. There have been attempts by black artists to try and figure out how to represent that in some kind of way. "

" I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands. "

" One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person. "

Kerry James Marshall

People

Black

" People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken. "

Kerry James Marshall

Black

Art

" The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms. "

" My ambition was never to make a lot of money. It wasn't to travel around the world. I was really just struggling to make the best pictures I could make. "

" For black people who are really dark - and a lot of black people were averse to be dark skinned - it was believed that you'd be so dark that you couldn't see them at night unless they were smiling or you could see the whites of their eyes. At one time, it was a sharp comic barb that got levelled at some people. "

" You don't see black people winning Nobel prizes for physics or economics or any of the industries or institutions that shape the way the world operates. "

" I see life and the world simply as an arena for competition. That's just what people do, and there are always going to be winners and losers. "

" For black people, everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic. "

" Clarity is important. Part of what I'm trying to do with some of these pictures is eliminate as much of the potential, as many kind of readings as people might want to make, as possible. "

" If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures. "

" People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy. "

" When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you. "

" To me, if there is any sort of value added to the accumulation of knowledge over time, then the work of artists should be a reflection of that accumulated value, accumulated knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have the sophistication to put that into play in the work you're making. "

" I see myself as having fulfilled a lot of my ambition. All the things I dreamed of achieving, I've achieved for the most part. "

" What I hope 'Mastry' ends up doing is completely undermining or doing away with the notion that artists are a savant: that they do things that can't be articulated, driven by inner turmoil they don't have access to. "

" I try to make work about things that matter. "

" When you grow up looking at Superman, Batman, and all those superheroes, you take it for granted that is what superheroes are supposed to be. So then, when I see art books at the library, and I'm seeing Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, I think that's what artists look like. "

" The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act. "

" I stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book 'Great Negroes, Past and Present' in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. I was in the fifth grade. "

" Every step on my way to becoming an artist seemed preordained. The right people were always in the right places at the right times to boost me to the next level. I was fortunate to be selected for a summer drawing class offered to teens at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County. "

" My dream was always to be in museums. It's a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions. "

" Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic. "

" The National Gallery is the place that means to represent everything that's good and important in art and show what it believes everyone who is a citizen should recognize and engage. "

" There are fewer representations of black figures in the historical record. "

" If you ever find yourself on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you look around in every direction and don't see anything. That's a terrifying experience. "