A Quote by Emma Ishta
My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'
I come from a real working class background, and I didn't know anyone sophisticated - except I saw Edie Sedgewick once at the Art Museum in Philly. She had these black leotards and little black pumps and this big ermine cape and all these white dogs and black sunglasses and black eyes. She was classy!
The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.
When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent.
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.
I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
The world of contemporary art has, in a way, exponentially expanded in the last couple of decades, and almost every major city in Europe and Asia and North America has fallen over themselves to have their own contemporary art museum.
We always have a great time touring Germany, but one of my favourite museums in the world is Museum Ludwig, an incredible contemporary art museum in Cologne. I could spend all day in it.
When we hold a photo negative up to the light all objects are reversed. Black is white, white is black. Moreover, the character lines of any face in the picture are not clear. Once placed into the developing solution, what photographers call "the latent image" is revealed in the print-darkness is turned to light; and, lo, we have a beautiful picture.
Just like in the art museum, and notions of beauty and pleasure, if the hero is always a white guy with a squared jaw or pretty woman with big breasts, then kids start thinking that's how it's supposed to be. Part of the problem was that black comic book artists were making super heroes with the same pattern as the white super heroes. When you read a lot of those comics, the black super heroes don't seem to have anything to do.
If I'm doing a logo, I'll do it in black and white. Once the form is feeling right, only then do I start exploring the color palettes. A good example was the process of rebranding the Salvador Dali Museum. I did at least 100 versions in black and white.
The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design.
I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
There's a beauty shop companion called School of Beauty, School of Culture at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I got an email that said a couple had a guerrilla wedding in front of that picture. They slipped into the museum with a preacher and had their wedding ceremony in front of it. It turns out that the woman is a beautician and the man is a barber, they had seen that picture, and they said it was the perfect place to get married.
[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it...)
People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.
Related Authors
Ashley Graham Quotes
American
Model
Chrissy Teigen Quotes
American
Model
Christy Turlington Quotes
American
Model
Coco Rocha Quotes
Canadian
Model
Emily Ratajkowski Quotes
British
Model
Gigi Hadid Quotes
American
Model
Gisele Bundchen Quotes
Brazilian
Model
Grace Jones Quotes
Jamaican
Model
Heidi Klum Quotes
German
Model
Irina Shayk Quotes
Russian
Model
Jerry Hall Quotes
American
Model
Kate Moss Quotes
English
Model
Miranda Kerr Quotes
Australian
Model
Nina Agdal Quotes
Danish
Model
Tara Stiles Quotes
American
Model
Tyra Banks Quotes
American
Model