A biography for Kerry James Marshallhasn’t been written yet.
“Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.”
“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.”
“You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I try to make work about things that matter.”
“The U.S. was founded as a white supremacist nation; that's just what it is.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.”
“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.”
“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 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.”