Kerry James Marshall: On Museums | Art21 "Extended Play"

[Kerry James Marshall: On Museums]

You walk into the museum, and the way the
museums are structured--

especially the kind of great encyclopedic
museums,

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...

you can get to 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.