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
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The use of black in art symbolizes depth and cultural identity.
Kerry James Marshall emphasizes the significance of using black in his artworks as a means to articulate the richness and complexities of black identity and culture. The blackness serves not only as an aesthetic choice but also as a powerful rhetorical tool, engaging in a dialogue about black history and experiences that resonate deeply within the community.
Themes
BlacknessCultureIdentityArtHistory
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on cultural representation in art, I would cite this quote to highlight the importance of identity.
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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Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
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