Latest Kerry James Marshall Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

• I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward poverty : "As an artist, you don't make money." I had to figure out some kind of way to guarantee that I'd be able to continue doing the work that I wanted to do, whether I made money from the work I was doing or not.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Mean, Artist, Poverty

  Source: www.mtv.com

• The first freedom is to be in possession of yourself - to own yourself, to not be subject to the will of somebody else. In a capitalist society, that means having a certain economic wherewithal so that you can do what you wish to do without having to ask permission.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Mean, Wish, Economic

  Source: www.mtv.com

• One of the things I recognized early on, doing whatever studies of black history I have, is that even though black folks were transported as slaves, into servitude, when they were carried out of Africa they left empty-handed, but they didn't leave empty-headed. They carried with them the culture they knew, the culture they had, and that culture reconstituted itself in all the places they went.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Black History, Culture, Study

  Source: www.mtv.com

• For black people in the western hemisphere, if you can't generate a mythology that creates models of heroism and power out of the mythology that you had, then that means that somehow the mythology you had was not only feeble and weak, but that you are ultimately a powerless people. That's a notion that, I think, that can't be accepted.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: www.mtv.com

• If you have a dream: Number one, make a plan. And then execute that plan. And there will be failures along that line. Don't let that discourage you. Because failure is part of the process ... make the necessary adjustments and you can be successful at whatever you do.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Dream, Successful, Numbers

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

• 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

• My own personal sound is really progressive. It's like a mixture of gospel, pop, neo-soul, R&B. It's like a huge gumbo. If you're eating gumbo you grab a whole like cup full of whatever. You're getting a whole bunch of stuff that makes this amazing food in your mouth. So that's essentially kind of like what my sound is.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Soul, Cups, Sound

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• There's a beauty shop companion called School of Beauty, School of Culture at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I got an email that said a couple had a guerrilla wedding in front of that picture. They slipped into the museum with a preacher and had their wedding ceremony in front of it. It turns out that the woman is a beautician and the man is a barber, they had seen that picture, and they said it was the perfect place to get married.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Art, Couple, School

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Kerry James Marshall

  People, Fiction, Science Fiction

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

  Kerry James Marshall

  People, Imagination, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Artist, People, Gateways

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Kerry James Marshall

  Should, Messy, Position

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the museum were perfectly satisfied with the narrative they were constructing.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Museums, People, Asking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The moment you introduce difference into a museum, then the privileged space is contested, and under the most ideal circumstances what all artists want is the chance to be competitive. That's what I think the museum is supposed to be.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Thinking, Artist, Differences

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.

  Kerry James Marshall

  Fighting, Thinking, Museums

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com