Kerry James Marshall
(c)image: Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, and Koplin Del Rio, CA
"... I asked myself, What would happen to Analytical Cubism if you kept that fragmented structure but put back in all the stuff they took out? Cubism foregrounded a fragmented view of things, representing all sides at once. To make that clear, they eliminated all the things that could confuse the picture... So I set out to make collages that had a similar kind of fragmented structure, but that contained more details, more realistic representations. And a narrative content. I wanted to see if I could contstruct a unified picture field with so much tension among its parts that it seemed likely to explode. This was a project to solve a problem proposed by Picasso and Braque." (Kerry James Marshall in conversation with Arthur Jafa, 2000)