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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”