I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands.

Kerry James Marshall

I don't want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I'm really interested in.

Kerry James Marshall

If you ever find yourself on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you look around in every direction and don't see anything. That's a terrifying experience.

Kerry James Marshall

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 Marshall

Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important.

Kerry James Marshall

You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.

Kerry James Marshall

At a certain point, you have to decide whether you'd be satisfied always acknowledging the beauty and the greatness of what other people create or if you want to be in the same arena.

Kerry James Marshall

The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.

Kerry James Marshall

The National Gallery is the place that means to represent everything that's good and important in art and show what it believes everyone who is a citizen should recognize and engage.

Kerry James Marshall

My dream was always to be in museums. It's a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions.

Kerry James Marshall

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.

Kerry James Marshall

One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person.

Kerry James Marshall

There are fewer representations of black figures in the historical record.

Kerry James Marshall

What you're trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody knows you, or somebody's a friend, or somebody's being generous to you.

Kerry James Marshall

I see myself as having fulfilled a lot of my ambition. All the things I dreamed of achieving, I've achieved for the most part.

Kerry James Marshall

My ambition was never to make a lot of money. It wasn't to travel around the world. I was really just struggling to make the best pictures I could make.

Kerry James Marshall

I think the only value of being in school is that everything you do should be a problem that needs to be solved. Everything should be a challenge.

Kerry James Marshall

If people keep telling you you can't do a thing, then you need to find a really good reason to continue. If someone tells you you can't do something, how will you know? If someone tells you something is impossible, how will you know?

Kerry James Marshall

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function.

Kerry James Marshall

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall Quotes

I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands.

I don't want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I'm really interested in.

If you ever find yourself on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you look around in every direction and don't see anything. That's a terrifying experience.

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.

You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.

At a certain point, you have to decide whether you'd be satisfied always acknowledging the beauty and the greatness of what other people create or if you want to be in the same arena.

The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.

The National Gallery is the place that means to represent everything that's good and important in art and show what it believes everyone who is a citizen should recognize and engage.

My dream was always to be in museums. It's a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions.

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.

One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person.

There are fewer representations of black figures in the historical record.

What you're trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody knows you, or somebody's a friend, or somebody's being generous to you.

I see myself as having fulfilled a lot of my ambition. All the things I dreamed of achieving, I've achieved for the most part.

My ambition was never to make a lot of money. It wasn't to travel around the world. I was really just struggling to make the best pictures I could make.

I think the only value of being in school is that everything you do should be a problem that needs to be solved. Everything should be a challenge.

If people keep telling you you can't do a thing, then you need to find a really good reason to continue. If someone tells you you can't do something, how will you know? If someone tells you something is impossible, how will you know?

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function.