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" 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

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" 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

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

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I try to make work about things that matter. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Kerry James Marshall

" 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

" 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

" 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