"Art making is a form of alchemy, in a way, because you are trying…to make gold from nothing. When it works very well is when you manage to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary."
"Many Mansions" (detail; 1994)
Many Mansions, detail, 1994
Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas; 114 x 135 inches
Art Institute of Chicago, Max V. Kohnstamm Fund, 1995
Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 1 episode, "Identity," 2001
© Art21, Inc. 2001
"I think in general the paintings have been really well received. But there's a lingering controversy around the sort of unequivocally black, kind of emphatically black figures. I wouldn't have done them if I didn't feel it, but I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful."
—Kerry James Marshall
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