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" 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. "

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" Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important. "

Kerry James Marshall

Decision

You

I Am

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

Kerry James Marshall

People

Black

" In Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world. "

" 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. "

" If people keep telling you you can't do a thing, then you need to find a really good reason to continue. If someone tells you you can't do something, how will you know? If someone tells you something is impossible, how will you know? "

" 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. "

" If you walk into any magazine store, I guarantee that nine out of 10 covers will feature white, blonde, blue-eyed, slim women because that's still the ideal of beauty. When a black or Asian figure shows up in a fashion magazine, she's the exception, not the rule. "

" A close friend of mine described me as a radical pragmatist. I embrace this no-nonsense distinction wholeheartedly. It is a character trait that matches the sense of myself I've had from as far back as I can remember. I am not one who goes in much for magical thinking. I don't believe in destiny, fate, or things like divine guidance, either. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" You can't be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility. "

" You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world. "

" The U.S. was founded as a white supremacist nation; that's just what it is. "

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

" I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are collected and made available to art-loving audiences. "

" I think the only value of being in school is that everything you do should be a problem that needs to be solved. Everything should be a challenge. "

" 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. "

" My first black-on-black picture was 'The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.' I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony - all of that. "

" 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. "

" My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I go to the movies, I'm expected to identify with all of the characters, and most of them are white. But when you put a black character in there, somehow the white audience isn't expected to identify with them. That's a problem. "