And I worked on a remodeling project with the architect teacher at Jefferson High for a HUD project they were getting ready for a low income family. I learned how to do plastering, plumbing, electrical, roofing, drywall, carpentry. [APPLAUSE] But here's the thing, so when you know those kinds of things-- and on top of it, my father was one of those tinkerer kind of guy. He liked to buy watches, but high-end watches, Patek Philippe, Baume and Mercier, Piaget. He was buying those watches at pawn shops, reconditioning them, and then putting an ad in the paper and selling them to people who would come into our house to buy them. And he studied auto mechanics when he was in school.
And so we would go out into the yard and do auto mechanic work. And my father told me, Kerry, if there's something that another human being made, then you can make it too. If you don't know how to do it, you go to the library. There's a book in there, a manual, that will tell you how to get it done. So when the head gasket blew on my 1961 Chevy, I went and rented a torque wrench, bought a head gasket, sent the head that was on there to a machine shop. And when I came back, I went to the library and got a book, the Chevy manual showed you what the pattern of tightening those bolts was and how tight to put them. You needed a torque wrench for that. I put the head on myself online casinos for usa players. So you learn that there's nothing that can't be known and there's nothing that can't be done. Anybody can do that if you want to do it. And so the golden age of education was a moment in which it gave people the confidence to know that you can take a piece of raw material and turn it into something just as well as anybody else can take a piece of raw material and turn it into something. You don't have to always just buy your stuff out of the store that somebody else made because you don't know how it was put together. That's the way I operate in the world. And so when you hear me talk about the way I approach my artwork, you hear the same thing. I'm saying the same thing. And artwork ain't nothing really. [LAUGHTER] Think about it. I mean Maurice Denis was right. A painting a nothing but lines and colors arranged in a certain order. That's all it is. Now, the order you arrange them in, you know, that's something else you can talk about. But it ain't no great mystery. Those are the things that people do. And anything that people do is a thing that can be understood by other people. [APPLAUSE] One last thing, I was also a production designer on Sankofa for Haile Gerima. So I did that too. JACQUELINE STEWART: So we have time for one more question. I'm going to look to this side of the room. Hello. AUDIENCE: Could you speak a little bit more about your comic art? KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: Not you James. We're not doing you, James. AUDIENCE: You know I have to talk about-- AUDIENCE: We can't hear you. KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: OK, but we'll let the woman in the back, she's got the mic this time. AUDIENCE: Sorry, could you speak a little bit about your comic work that you showed on screen? Could talk a little bit more about that in depth? KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: In depth, huh? [LAUGHTER] JACQUELINE STEWART: Semi in-depth. [LAUGHING] KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: OK, so, yeah, that project comes out of-- the overarching project was called "Rhythm Master." So I mean, it really is another one of these instances in which I'm trying to resolve what I find to be an inadequacy. And part of that inadequacy has to do with who occupies the space of the superhero. And whether you can develop a black-centered, fantastical, superhero narrative that has the capacity to claim a space in the culture that is the equivalent of everything that we understand about the superhero pantheon that was created by Marvel Comics, from Spiderman, the X-Men. From DC you got Batman. You get Superman.
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