Protest Art Quotes

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.

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

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

Bands like Nirvana had theatrical sensibilities, playing with image, challenging assumptions people were making about them, the apex being Kurt Cobain in a dress to make a point.

Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.

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

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

I plan to send my liver somewhere in France, to protest foie gras (liver pate) ... I plan to have handbags made from my skin ... and an umbrella stand made from my seat.

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

I wouldn't want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities.

'Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies' is a piece that I did around the time that I was very frustrated and angry with the fact that the U.S., where I live, had decided to pull itself into another war. I was really angry.

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.

I don’t see myself as a dissident artist. I see them as a dissident government

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

I think at some point there may be artists who will get fed up, and they deliberately want to use their art as a means to rock the waves a little bit. And instead of doing the status quo, they'll deliberately go out to really make a change. I think Kendrick Lamar is an example of that.

Cartoons were very conservative. The country was very conservative. Although the liberals were allegedly in charge for a long time, there was a very acceptable balance what people would talk about in public. And I wanted to stretch those and move further out. And as the civil rights movement began, I started doing cartoons on that and on sit-ins and I was, along with Bill Mauldin, a great cartoonist out of World War II, arguably one of two white cartoonists doing this kind of work, Bill and me.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

As a student, I was a total jhalli who used to wear torn denims, faded kurtis, kohled eyes and thought that I was the coolest girl ever! We were a bunch of students who used to do social-issue-based street plays and believed that we could bring about a change in the world.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

I've done a lot of guerrilla theater in my time.

This film [Chi-Raq]is a declaration. It's a scream. It's a warning. And I can really break it down to one scene. That's the scene where we have the eulogy and sermon that is given by the great John Cusack.

Art is activism.