Quote

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

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
Every
Allusion
Symmetry
Abstraction
Appearance
Aspect
Control
Fact
Facts

More quotes by 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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I think we need to remember...that a lot of energy was put into changing things to get us to the point where we are now. But being where we are now doesn't mean that we don't have to put in the same kind of energy to get us to a place where we ought to be.
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 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
Image
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
Image
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
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
What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
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
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
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