Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.
Kerry James MarshallThe privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.
Kerry James MarshallMusic 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 MarshallMy 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 MarshallBefore 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 MarshallThere'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