Quotes About Identity

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.

An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.

All art is self-portraiture.

A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

I draw manga, therefore I am!

I paint my own reality.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

We were told, quite seriously, that there never would be a Canadian art because we had no art tradition.

The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.

As an artist one has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I just do art because I'm ugly and there's nothing else for me to do.

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

Nowhere beats the heart so kindly as beneath the tartan plaid!

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?