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I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power.

Kerry James Marshall

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Kerry James Marshall
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 17
Artist
Drawer
Painter
Birmingham
Alabama
Kerry Marshall
Powerful
Amazingly
Black
Blackness
Beautiful
Imagery
Power
Extreme
Kind
Extremes
Think
Tend
Emblem
Thinking
Image
Reclaim
Color
Emblems

More quotes by Kerry James Marshall

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What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.
Kerry James Marshall
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Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.
Kerry James Marshall
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My own personal sound is really progressive. It's like a mixture of gospel, pop, neo-soul, R&B. It's like a huge gumbo. If you're eating gumbo you grab a whole like cup full of whatever. You're getting a whole bunch of stuff that makes this amazing food in your mouth. So that's essentially kind of like what my sound is.
Kerry James Marshall
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I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.
Kerry James Marshall
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The first freedom is to be in possession of yourself - to own yourself, to not be subject to the will of somebody else. In a capitalist society, that means having a certain economic wherewithal so that you can do what you wish to do without having to ask permission.
Kerry James Marshall
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Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.
Kerry James Marshall
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Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the museum were perfectly satisfied with the narrative they were constructing.
Kerry James Marshall
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If you have a dream: Number one, make a plan. And then execute that plan. And there will be failures along that line. Don't let that discourage you. Because failure is part of the process ... make the necessary adjustments and you can be successful at whatever you do.
Kerry James Marshall
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The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.
Kerry James Marshall
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I want to create music that you can just vibe to. Put in your car and just you know like you roll all the windows up and you're like dancing and you just don't know why you're dancing but the music just makes you move.
Kerry James Marshall
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[My picture A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ] was a way of demonstrating that there was a broad range of possibilities and fairly unlimited utility for a black figure that didn't have to comprise its blackness in order to preserve a place in the field of representation.
Kerry James Marshall
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No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.
Kerry James Marshall
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The moment you introduce difference into a museum, then the privileged space is contested, and under the most ideal circumstances what all artists want is the chance to be competitive. That's what I think the museum is supposed to be.
Kerry James Marshall
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The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.
Kerry James Marshall
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I still make paintings and use the figure it's hard to do and hard to succeed. On some levels, because I am working with black figures and black pigment, it's even harder because I have to be more responsible for the image. I try to be really careful about the presence the figure projects.
Kerry James Marshall
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Part of the history of black people in the western hemisphere, in some ways, has been fleeing from this notion that they were black. So I can represent an ideal, and with that, you can demonstrate that there is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to run from, and that, in fact, a good deal of beauty that resides there.
Kerry James Marshall
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Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.
Kerry James Marshall
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I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.
Kerry James Marshall
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I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.
Kerry James Marshall
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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.
Kerry James Marshall