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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the association of darkness with negativity and subjugation in Western thought and visual culture.
Kerry James Marshall points out the historical and cultural biases that equate darkness, both in terms of color and metaphorically as evil. He highlights how these associations have pervaded Western art and society, rendering representations of dark skin as commonplace and stripped of their original significance. By reiterating these images in art, he encourages the re-examination of their connotations and the power dynamics involved in these portrayals.
Themes
DarknessSubjugationRepresentationWestern CulturePower Dynamics
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about racial representation in art, this quote can highlight the importance of recognizing and challenging historical biases.
More from Kerry James Marshall
All quotes →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
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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