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" The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act. "
Kerry James Marshall
Kind
Revision
Political
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" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Look
Yourself
Boat
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
People
Want
Pictures
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
School
Great
Book
" 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
Me
Black
Art
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Self
Artist
Picture
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Step
Drawing
Artist
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
World
Competition
Life
" If I go to the museum and see white bodies, black bodies, Asian bodies, Latino bodies, then I will expect to see those things every time I go. That matters a lot. "
Kerry James Marshall
Matters
White
Time
" I gave up on the idea of making art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what art is returned as a critical issue. "
Kerry James Marshall
Art
Up
Time
" I try to make work about things that matter. "
Kerry James Marshall
About
Work
Make
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Work
Knowledge
Reflection
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Black
See
You
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Music
Black
Culture
" The U.S. was founded as a white supremacist nation; that's just what it is. "
Kerry James Marshall
Founded
Nation
White
" My dream was always to be in museums. It's a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions. "
Kerry James Marshall
Dream
Museums
Important
" Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised. "
Kerry James Marshall
Because
Always
Black
" 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
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Nation
Always
Men
" 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? "
Kerry James Marshall
People
Know
You
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
White
Kind
People
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Responsibility
Black
Feel
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Black
Character
Movies
" One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person. "
Kerry James Marshall
People
Black
Am
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Beauty
You
People
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
You
Experience
World
" Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time. "
Kerry James Marshall
Live
Time
Trouble
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Driven
Away
Doing
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
School
Challenge
Think
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Construction
Two
Side
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Destiny
I Am
Myself