African American Art Quotes

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.

American music culture is black culture.

There is no monolithic black culture. It's completely different for someone born in Harlem to someone born in Houston or London with one exception, which is that people contributing to black culture have the experience of being black.

I learned a lot about American history though jazz, and that's why I loved American history when I was in high school. I could hear different stories - the story that they would tell in school, and then the story that I would hear in the music.

One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person.

Black culture - we dance and sing. We're entertainers. James Brown said it best: the things we are make people want to be like us.

I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.

From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

'Smart Funny and Black' is basically a live black pop culture game show that I created. We have a live band. We have two contestants that we call 'blacksperts.' They come on stage and compete in games that I've created that test their knowledge of black culture, black history, and the black experience.

Black culture has been a huge influence in my life.

I'm sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called 'The Huey P. Newton Story,' and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.

In the Studio Museum in Harlem, when I was dealing with that community and dealing with my peers in the streets, it allowed for me to get outside of Yale, to get outside of art-speak, and to really think about art as a material practice that has very useful and pragmatic material precedent.

When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.

In the imagination, Harlem will always be the spiritual capital of black excellence in America.

When I think of the Harlem Renaissance, I think of bright colors, and bold, dynamic art. African American artists of the period were, in large measure, breaking out of the constrictions white society had set for them. They were claiming and remaking their own images, and doing so in bold and striking ways.

Slaves and the descendants of slaves created world pop culture. Let's keep it real and be very respectful about that.

As long as black people preserve their culture in Harlem, Harlem will always be alive.

As far as I'm concerned, the voices of Washington, black Washington, it's poetry, man. There's beauty in it.

America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its humor; its music.