[Kerry James Marshall: On Museums]
You walk into the museum, and the way the museum is structured
especially the kind of great encyclopedic museum,
where you could come in and your introduction to the art world
is through the primitive and the ancient collections.
And then you start moving up the stairs, and you go into the
medieval European work.
And then you go all the way through from the 14th century, the 15th century,
the 16th century, the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century,
All of that stuff is magnificent stuff.
It’s all good. You know, we all like it.
But you become
At some point you become acutely aware of your absence in the whole kind of
historical timeline that develops this kind of narrative of mastery.
We take it for granted that this is just the way art history has been structured.
It's like, the people who make stuff
and that's the people who make the best stuff
You know, they are all Europeans.
They are all Europeans.
And when do other people start to come in to the field?
Well, only after they have been dominated and colonized by Europeans.
And then what do they start to do?
They started to do what the Europeans were doing.
If there were as many institutions like the Museum of Modern Art,
like the Whitney Museum, like the Metropolitan Museum
if there was as many institutions that people were clamoring to get into
that were run by Black people and Chinese people and everybody,
then this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
It is only an issue because there’s only this one set of institutions
that everybody recognizes as being the best,
and you know that you’re not controlling them,
so you got to keep asking the people who are controlling them to let you in.