Art Activism Quotes

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

My theater has always been a political battle on the stage.

Rock-and-roll was an example of change in the body of the culture. I think it's really what helped bring the anti-war movement to its peak and moved people into the streets to seize the day - the movement was the embodiment of what was happening in the music. This is what taught me that it was possible to bring art and activism together. Without that piece, that energetic embodiment piece, the rest is just intellectual construct.

Music and improving the world are two sides of the same coin.

Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.

I feel like being an artist and being an activist are separate things; I know some people who feel very differently.

I feel like we have to fight for art.

I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.

My drawings and paintings were done as an act of protest; I was trying by means of my work to convince the world that it is ugly, sick and hypocritical.

I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

Terence McKenna says, "The culture is not your friend." I am not sure we can change this culture. But I think we can rise above it and create a new world. That's why I so deeply believe in alternative spaces. That's why I believe in the power of art and activism.

Peggy Guggenheim is a real hero to have done what she did in a man's world, as the art world still is.

I want to create the largest-ever participatory art project and highlight the concept of Shadow Philanthropy, where people help others create work without taking credit for it - through this we can really change the world.

Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.

You can positively affect and change a social circumstance with art, and it’s vital that a change happens now.

I helped found Artists for New South Africa, but it used to be called Artists for Free South Africa. Alfre Woodard and a bunch of us started this.

There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

The art that I do is for the people. It is about engaging a new audience who wouldn't necessarily go to art galleries and museums and painting on the street is the best way to do that.

War and peace-making, human rights, humanitarian issues have become industries, but nobody looks closely at human greed, at the arms industry and the manufacture of landmines. Art has to take a wider view. The problems of Ireland are my problems, too.

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.

I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.

Me and Mr. Brainwash in Toronto signing his mural at Hard Candy Fitness Opening! #artforfreedom

As [John Heartfield] was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupification, under his fingers began to signify.