Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Picture
Art
Beauty
Related Quotes:
" 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
Book
Myself
History
" 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
Black
Dark
Night
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Black
Say
Think
" 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
I See
Achieving
See
" 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
" There are fewer representations of black figures in the historical record. "
Kerry James Marshall
Historical
Record
Black
" 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
" 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
Problem
Political
History
" 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
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Look
You
Work
" Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic. "
Kerry James Marshall
Two
Different
Paths
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Create
Trying
You
" Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time. "
Kerry James Marshall
Live
Time
Trouble
" 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
" 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
Kind
Black
Try
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Darkness
You
Time
" 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
" 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
World
Yourself
You
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
You
Women
Walk
" 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
" 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
" The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade. "
Kerry James Marshall
Invention
Trade
Slave
" 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
" 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
People
Trying
Important
" 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