…A lot of it started to circulate around the idea of post-Blackness out of the Freestyle show that Thelma Golden curated at the Studio Museum in Harlem. When you read the reviews of those shows, you have writers like Peter Schjeldahl saying “Yeah, yeah, this post-Black thing is hip because man, we are tired of all this race and identity politics and culture, we don’t want no more of that stuff. Let’s just get on with the business of making art.” And then other echoes of it in other articles, in the New York Times and places like that. So I pick up on those kinds of things.

So part of the reason I started making these Rococo paintings, or paintings that use Rococo as a point of departure, and use the cartoon balloons and the love themes and things like that is that well, if the culture–in a sense the mainstream, because the code, the way they speak about it is, “the mainstream is tired of hearing about all these other issues”–well, if the mainstream is tired of hearing about all these issues, then what’s left for people of color, or people who have a problem with the mainstream ideology or philosophy? What’s left for people like that to do? Well the only thing that’s left really is to make pictures about love. And so in response to that I started to do these vignette paintings, which are in black and white partly because there’s a refusal there–to deliver on all of the notes that Rococo painting and all of the sentimental representations–to refuse to deliver on all of the notes that that’s supposed to deliver on. And to give you the one point of color, the most frivolous part of the whole thing as a kind of a balloon, a bubble that can be burst really easy, and that’s the hearts that sort of float up from it. Because if you look at the relationship between the couples, in their character there’s some bit of apprehension in the relationship, especially on the part of the female figure in the works. And so there’s that kind of ambivalence about their true relationship, but it’s couched in this form that when people read it they immediately start thinking about notions of pleasure.

— Kerry James Marshall, live interview at Threewalls, October 24, 2006, episode #61, edited and re-broadcast February 28, 2017, episode #577, BAD AT SPORTS