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
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.
In practice
In a discussion on diversity at a gallery event.
You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does.
Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.
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