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" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

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

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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

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

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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. "

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

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

Kerry James Marshall

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

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Kerry James Marshall

" 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