Kerry James Marshall Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Reality, Color, White

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  9 Copy quote

• Sometimes when I can't communicate that I'm frustrated, I'll just grab my guitar and I can play out that emotion and be able to cope with whatever is going on. So even being able to, like I said, share this gift with so many other people, it's definitely very therapeutic. It helps me just to focus and to be able to kind of get out those emotions that I'm having without reacting in such a way that's not acceptable in society.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Play, Guitar, People

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Color, People, Understanding

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• I really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Dream, Inspiration, Guitar

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of stuff that I dealt with - music was my serenity, like kind of my safe place, my haven that I would just use in order to really just get away from the things that I saw every day. To kind of erase the things that I saw. So I stayed playing.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Order, Serenity, Saws

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

  4 Copy quote

• I just thought someone has to figure out how to break through that barrier and create a narrative for a black super hero story to unfold at the same scale as something like Star Wars. Rythm Mastr is about producing a narrative of a hero engaged in a struggle as complicated as those other stories. The catalyst for it was the beginning of the demolition of public housing in Chicago.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Stars, War, Hero

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Facts, Appearance, Aspect

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• I still make paintings and use the figure; it's hard to do and hard to succeed. On some levels, because I am working with black figures and black pigment, it's even harder because I have to be more responsible for the image. I try to be really careful about the presence the figure projects.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Black, Trying, Succeed

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Just like in the art museum, and notions of beauty and pleasure, if the hero is always a white guy with a squared jaw or pretty woman with big breasts, then kids start thinking that's how it's supposed to be. Part of the problem was that black comic book artists were making super heroes with the same pattern as the white super heroes. When you read a lot of those comics, the black super heroes don't seem to have anything to do.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Art, Book, Hero

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

• Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Two, Different, Path

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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 engage with the black body. There was always simultaneity that had nothing to do with visuality. You can be there and not be there at the same time and be fully visible all the time. That's what really struck me about Ellison .

  Kerry James Marshall

  Black, Desire, Body

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  9 Copy quote

• I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Artist, Self, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Kind

  Source: www.mtv.com

  4 Copy quote

• I want to create music that you can just vibe to. Put in your car and just you know like you roll all the windows up and you're like dancing and you just don't know why you're dancing but the music just makes you move.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Moving, Dancing, Car

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

  4 Copy quote

• Music is the universal language, it evokes an emotion in all of us. That, we can all look at each other and we may not speak the same language, but that song or that melody can make us feel the same thing. And we can look at each other and agree and be like, "that did something for us". It makes us feel unified and connected.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Song, May, Looks

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

  4 Copy quote

• I try to tell a story when I'm playing. I try to make an emotional connection when I'm playing versus before I played just to play. Now there's a sense of purpose of why I play, of how I play. So people can actually feel what I'm saying to them.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Emotional, Play, People

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

  4 Copy quote

• Part of what I am dealing with, with this blackness, is asking the question, "Where are those black people, who are as dark as the description of a young black boy that Solomon Northup gives in 12 Years A Slave?" He describes the young black 14-year-old boy as "blacker than any crow." You have to question if he is using that metaphorically or as a descriptive?

  Kerry James Marshall

  Dark, Boys, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Trying, Shapes, Consideration

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• The condition of visibility as it relates to black people was crucial. Connected to that, I've always been interested in science fiction and horror films and was acutely aware of the political and social implications of Ralph Ellison's description of invisibility as it relates to black people, as opposed to the kind of retinal invisibility that H.G. Wells described in his novel Invisible Man.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Men, People, Political

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

• When State Way Gardens and The Robert Taylor Homes were being torn down, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to use that as a backdrop for the development of a super hero narrative.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Hero, Home, Garden

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• [My picture A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ] was a way of demonstrating that there was a broad range of possibilities and fairly unlimited utility for a black figure that didn't have to comprise its blackness in order to preserve a place in the field of representation.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Artist, Self, Order

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• You can describe [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self] as a manifesto of sorts. I saw it as a pivotal turn, a work that really led me down the avenues that brought me to where I am. That picture was the vehicle that helped me clarify a lot of things and I began to understand that I wanted to do.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Artist, Self, Shadow

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Comics also led a lot of young people to science fiction.

  Kerry James Marshall

  People, Fiction, Science Fiction

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

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