If I go to the museum and see white bodies, black bodies, Asian bodies, Latino bodies, then I will expect to see those things every time I go. That matters a lot. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
I see life and the world simply as an arena for competition. That’s just what people do, and there are always going to be winners and losers. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
People don’t really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won’t give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
My first black-on-black picture was ‘The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.’ I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony – all of that. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
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. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
To me, if there is any sort of value added to the accumulation of knowledge over time, then the work of artists should be a reflection of that accumulated value, accumulated knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have the sophistication to put that into play in the work you’re making. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
What I hope ‘Mastry’ ends up doing is completely undermining or doing away with the notion that artists are a savant: that they do things that can’t be articulated, driven by inner turmoil they don’t have access to. Kerry James Marshall Read Quote
