Quote

[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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kerry James Marshall
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 17
Artist
Drawer
Painter
Birmingham
Alabama
Kerry Marshall
Way
Fields
Possibilities
Portraits
Possibility
Range
Broads
Black
Former
Representation
Artist
Field
Broad
Comprise
Order
Figure
Unlimited
Demonstrating
Didn
Picture
Fairly
Blackness
Place
Shadow
Preserve
Portrait
Self
Figures
Preserves
Utility

More quotes by Kerry James Marshall

Image
What I preserved in the figures [at Invisible Man] are those white eyes and white teeth, because that's still connected to the way in which blackness, in the extreme, has been stigmatized and the way it was often joked that you couldn't see black people in the dark until they had their eyes open or were smiling.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
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
Image
A lot of stuff that I dealt with - music was my serenity, like kind of my safe place, my haven that I would just use in order to really just get away from the things that I saw every day. To kind of erase the things that I saw. So I stayed playing.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
I try to tell a story when I'm playing. I try to make an emotional connection when I'm playing versus before I played just to play. Now there's a sense of purpose of why I play, of how I play. So people can actually feel what I'm saying to them.
Kerry James Marshall