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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The contributions of African-American artists have often been undervalued and underrepresented in history.
Kerry James Marshall’s quote emphasizes the historical underrepresentation and undervaluation of African-American artists in the context of art history. He suggests that their works, despite being significant, are often overlooked, relegated to a modest scale that leads to their inconsequentiality in the broader narrative of art and culture.
Themes
African-AmericanArtRepresentationHistoryValuation
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about cultural history, one might quote this to highlight the overlooked contributions of African-American artists.
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
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.
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
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