Quote

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

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
Space
Competitive
Chance
Ideal
Moment
Ideals
Contested
Artist
Artists
Introduce
Moments
Supposed
Museum
Think
Circumstances
Introducing
Thinking
Difference
Museums
Differences
Privileged

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.
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
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
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
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
Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.
Kerry James Marshall
Image
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
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
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 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
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
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 really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.
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
[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