Jamila Woods Quotes

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

The most important thing for me as an artist is having an identity.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

The whole Modernist lie is that art is about the artist.

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

My videos represent the artist in me very well, but not the kind of woman I am.

It's only recently that we've discovered that the artist's inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I'm happier to create exterior pieces for the world rather than to express something I deeply feel or wish to say.

For the life of me, I'll never understand how you can be an artist but not want people to understand who you are as a person.

People choose whatever projects they've seen that I've done over the years, and whichever one is their favorite is the only one they care about. But I realized that none of those were my voice or representative of what my thoughts and feelings were.

I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.

Honestly, I never felt like I wasn't an artist on my own. I always felt like the music I made was mine, whether it was part of a collaboration with people.

You cannot just be the feature act, not that that's a bad thing, because that's a good thing, especially nowadays. But as an artist, you want to express yourself and you want to know what you want to express.

I'm just going to sing my music; I'm going to write my songs, and I think that people get to know me in that sense.

My art in my head just needs to come out for me - for my legacy and who I am.

The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

Art never expresses anything but itself.

There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.

Art is about the edges and the sharp corners and those places are not conducive to activism, which is about putting on a gloss.