Kerry James Marshall

There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.

— Kerry James Marshall

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person…

— Kerry James Marshall

I try to make work about things that matter.

— Kerry James Marshall

I stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book 'Great Negroes, Past and Present' in the library at…

— 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…

— 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,…

— Kerry James Marshall

One of the things I recognized early on, doing whatever studies of black history I have, is that even though black folks…

— Kerry James Marshall

If you walk into any magazine store, I guarantee that nine out of 10 covers will feature white, blonde, blue-eyed, slim women…

— Kerry James Marshall

For black people who are really dark - and a lot of black people were averse to be dark skinned - it…

— Kerry James Marshall

Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the…

— Kerry James Marshall

What I hope 'Mastry' ends up doing is completely undermining or doing away with the notion that artists are a savant: that…

— 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…

— Kerry James Marshall

In [Ralph] Ellison's case, it's more psychological than it is phenomenal, and it's conditioned by anger, animosity, and lack of desire to…

— 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…

— Kerry James Marshall

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be…

— 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…

— Kerry James Marshall

When I go to the movies, I'm expected to identify with all of the characters, and most of them are white. But…

— 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…

— Kerry James Marshall

Music is the universal language, it evokes an emotion in all of us. That, we can all look at each other and…

— Kerry James Marshall

The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act.

— Kerry James Marshall

If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery,…

— Kerry James Marshall

I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward…

— Kerry James Marshall

The U.S. was founded as a white supremacist nation; that's just what it is.

— Kerry James Marshall

If you look at the image [ Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], it treads on…

— Kerry James Marshall

There's this idea that many of the attitudes and personality developments in black folks in the diaspora are a consequence of this…

— Kerry James Marshall