Quotes from Nell Irvin Painter

Science is a truth that is true no matter what, no matter when and for all time and science as the kind of gospel truth replaces the gospel, which was religion.

Being a graduate student is no fun and is hard, but I'm sticking with it. I love making art.

Making art for me is not fun in the sense of la, la, la, la, but it's something that I find very absorbing and very satisfying.

Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody's pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.

It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.

In the second place, the term "Caucasian" as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

It is important to notice that when Emerson said "American," he meant male white people of a certain socioeconomic standing—his. Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely.4

Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race (later translators would put that word in their mouths); instead, Greeks thought of place.

I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.

In sum, before an eighteenth-century boom in the African slave trade, between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people.

And instead of their advanced state in science being attributable to a superior development of intellectual faculties,…it is solely owing to…their innate thirst for blood and plunder.

we have been civilizing the Filipinos up to the point where they are unanimous only on one thing, namely, that they want us to leave."12

Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you've spent a long time drawing and sweating over it. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.

With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.

if preparation prevents war, there would have been no war in Europe. They spent twenty years preparing for it."29

described as indexical. What he meant was an image made by the physical being of the object, not a line drawing.

Over succeeding millennia, this contrast between king-ridden Asia and enterprising, individualist Europe hardened into a trope,

The alarming history of European marble "cleaning" includes a chapter on this statuary describing a drive to make ancient Greek art white nearly destroyed the art itself. In the 1930s workers in the British Museum were directed to remove the dark patina with metal tools on the mistaken assumption that their proper color should be white. Such a "cleaning" seriously damaged the Parthenon marbles, prompting an inquiry by the museum's standing committee that halted the work.

The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man,

In my history books I have already had my say in clear language and discursive meaning about community. Now what history means to me in images is freedom from coherence, clarity, and collective representation. My images carry their own visual meaning, which may or may not explicate history usefully or unequivocally. For me now, image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.

It wasn't always easy learning to be me . . . Being me, I guess, to be myself alone It was lonely, sometimes, sometimes it was blue

The household revolved around Matthias's power, his anger, and obedience to him in all things.