Mark Bradford Quotes

A lot of producers and creative types want to see you be you. Throw something else out there and show them where you would take this part. A lot of them are launching shows for the first time, so they've got a lot riding on this, too, and they want you to be their flight.

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.

If the arts are in peril, we must do our small part to to fight the good fight and protect and preserve.

Just as a city cannot protect its manufacturing base without keeping its factories, we cannot have a strong arts sector without studios, rehearsal space, and performance venues.

I wanted to show the community you can build something here without having to raid taxpayers' dollars. What better way to show the community what we're all about, as a welcome to come to the Institute of Contemporary Art and be a part of what we're doing here?

The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense.

The difference that a drama group or a cinema club can make to a small village or a town. It opens people up to ideas, potential about themselves that really, in a way, education often fails to. It's a way of drawing a community together.

Build your reputation by helping other people build theirs.

It is not true that I oppose government funding of the arts.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

I've always worked with people who have been supporters of me creatively.

Unfortunately, America doesn't have a minister of culture, and I don't understand why. It's really bad for young people.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

I think we have got to start thinking about banding together in terms of interested groups.

American museums have become cautious, because it is very hard to get money to do something different or controversial.

I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury.

The key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do, and more importantly, what they want to do.

Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country.

That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done.

Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation.

It's a false proposition that we have to take the arts away to fund something else.

First and foremost, I'm fans of the people I'm collaborating with. And collaborations expand who you are.

Stand in a way that you are always empowering people to join in, because the only way to be truly successful is not to succeed as an individual, but to succeed as a part of a community, of a country.

I'm really interested in the collaborative thing. It's what makes it scary because you never know what it's going to end up like. But you hope. You put yourself in the hands of the best people you can find, and you're completely dependent on the kindness of strangers and their commitment. It's like this mutual delusion.

The arts need funding.