“People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of r...” — Kerry James Marshall Quote

“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 stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book 'Great Negroes, Past and Present' in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. I was in the fifth grade.”

“People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.”

“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 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.”

“In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.”

“I think history is just so cyclical.”

“I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.”

“One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.”

“Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.”

“Nothing is insignificant in the history of a young community, and - above all - nothing seems impossible.”