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" 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
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" When you grow up looking at Superman, Batman, and all those superheroes, you take it for granted that is what superheroes are supposed to be. So then, when I see art books at the library, and I'm seeing Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, I think that's what artists look like. "
Kerry James Marshall
Look
You
Think
" 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 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
White
Great
Legacy
" 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
" 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
" 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
Best
Money
Travel
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Done
You
Beauty
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person. "
Kerry James Marshall
People
Black
Am
" 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
Magic
Information
Work
" 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. "
Kerry James Marshall
Place
Good
Citizen