Kerry James Marshall: Self-Satisfied
About
Kerry James Marshall discusses the lack of self-satisfied black figures throughout the history of art and the importance of filling this void with paintings of confident black figures who are not defined by trauma.
TRANSCRIPT
- Locate for me somewhere in the history of painting
- an image of a black person that is self-satisfied
- and at the point in which they are indifferent
- To me, those are important things to represent
- for a black figure.
- Because we don’t think of black figures
- being self-satisfied.
- Because the narrative of black presence
- Witness the Laquan McDonald video
- or the Eric Garner video
- or the Rodney King video—all those.
- It’s like that whole history of representation
- going all the way back even to
- the Without Sanctuary exhibition—I don't know
- if you’ve seen that—but the whole history of
- lynchings and postcard images of lynching
- So we’re used to representations of the black body
- What we’re rarely used to is the
- image of the black figure as a self-satisfied individual.
- So that's what the painting The Woman in the Mirror is.
- Without all of the clothes and things that
- you dress yourself up with
- When you present yourself to yourself,
- are you satisfied with that self?
- I mean that’s a part of what that picture
- The girl on the blanket,
- she’s there with the apparatus
- of photographic representation around her.
- She’s presented herself to be
- I’ll tell you, the man that cuts the grass
- here at the studio, he came and he saw that painting
- and he said, “Oh man, she is so cute."
- He said, "she's talking to me."
- And I thought that was a beautiful response.
- And that’s what I wanted somebody to be able to say
to the perception of the spectator.
is almost always traumatized.
and stuff like that.
as a kind of traumatized body in one way or another.
and you make yourself presentable to other people.
wants to suggest.
made into the image of desire.
[laughs]
about a picture like that.