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Danh ngôn của Kerry James Marshall (Sứ mệnh: 2)

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.
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.
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.
To me, if there is any sort of value added to the accumulation of knowledge over time, then the work of artists should be a reflection of that accumulated value, accumulated knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have the sophistication to put that into play in the work you're making.
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.
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.
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.