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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

Travel

Opportunity

Art

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential. "

" 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. "

" I used to always say - and I think a lot of artists think of it this way - that when you see a black figure, the way the critical establishment operated, you can only imagine that figure having a sociological value. They never say the ways in which their aesthetics were equally worthy of consideration. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Kerry James Marshall

People

Black

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

" 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. "

" There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work. "

" 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? "

" Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time. "

" Progress has always been understood to be driven by exceptional white men. Whether it's the military victories we've achieved, the philosophical foundations that are the underpinnings of the nation, or our economic ingenuity, all this has been articulated through narratives of exceptional white men. "

" Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function. "

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