You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
Kerry James MarshallRead
When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the underrepresentation of Black individuals in the realm of art and beauty.
Kerry James Marshall's quote addresses the systemic exclusion of Black figures in art museums, suggesting that traditional ideas of art and beauty often overlook or omit the Black experience. This observation invites deeper discussions about representation, inclusion, and the narratives that shape our understanding of art.
Themes
ArtRepresentationBeautyDiversityInclusion
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on diversity at a gallery event.
More from Kerry James Marshall
All quotes →In Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing.
Kerry James MarshallRead
My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.
Kerry James MarshallRead
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
Kerry James MarshallRead
The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.
Kerry James MarshallRead
Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.
Kerry James MarshallRead
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