Empowerment Through Art Quotes

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives

Honestly, I never thought I'd actually be playing a teen lesbian. I didn't think it was going to go this far. But I'm glad that it did, because there have been a lot of fans who have expressed that they've been going through similar situations in their lives.

I see a lot of young female performers who do not call themselves feminist, but would certainly believe in their own right to self-determination, and wouldn't want anybody to stop them from becoming themselves. They just refuse to recognize the relationship between their lives and those of other women, or feel any solidarity there.

I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.

It's very often the artist who gives a voice to the voiceless by speaking up when no one else will.

I've played lots of strong women in film, in big Hollywood films, and I've sometimes had a hard time in coming to a consensus of what makes a woman strong. What is it that positions her as a force to be reckoned with? And I think it's because there's an expectation from the get-go that she isn't. If you're not starting from a deficit as a point of view, but you're starting from an assumption that says, "Well, this is what women really are," then it's a really freeing experience as an actor and as a woman.

I don't think paintings of nude women represent all women, but at the same time, I can't fault artists for putting out what inspires and challenges them. But for me, I'm not sure it's necessary for our bodies to define us, especially now when there are so many examples of femininity, of womanhood.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

Girls are taught to sing high and pretty, like Antony, not low and from the guts like Nina Simone. But we're slowly trying to change that. There are so many things we're not told growing up, and it's our true feminist responsibility to take the truth to the people who need to hear it.

If you remain open to great directors who look like you, who know what they're doing and are making impactful films that are destroying these 'blockbuster films,' you can do okay, and everybody can get more of a piece of the pie. But you've got to be open and brave.

The important thing about doing art and writing is that we are using our voices and using them really, really loudly. And to any girls or young women who want to write comics, I tell them, "You have to use your voice. You have to take up space." We have to fight to be heard. No one else is going to fight for us.

My job is to confront apathy and confront all the forces that tend to batter each of us down with all kind of oppression, even self-oppression. I consider that the main job of the art that I do- to rattle the cage, wake people up, wake myself up, confront all that would conspire to keep us down.

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

Art's power of persuasion resides in the small personal details of one's own story, and if it weren't for my struggle with dyslexia, I doubt I'd ever have become a writer or known how to teach others to write.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.

Recently some work I made could be seen as feminist art or work that relates to the body. That's just what I'm feeling - like it needs to be done.

You should never feel afraid to become a piece of art. It's exhilarating.

Take criticism, smash it into dust. Add color and use it to paint breathtaking images of unicorns frolicking through endless fields of greatness.

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible.

Often much of my work is very optimistic, or solution-based. I have always believed that art is a tool for transformation, and something that should give people some kind of agency.

My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it.

There's room for Spike Lee's movies; there's room for Tyler Perry's movies. There's room for classics with an all black cast. There's room for all of it as long as we don't try to make any one piece define us as a race.

I've been thinking a lot about Lady Gaga and what she means for feminism. I think - I find her completely fascinating, and I really like what she has to say.

I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don't have to keep saying, We don't have work for black women.'