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" 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

Black

People

Understanding

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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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Time

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