Faith Ringgold Quotes

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it.

Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

To be successful in the world of art you must, of course, have talent, although very small talents have gone very far in this age. Just as the microphone gave volume to voices that had none, so does the science of press-agentry magnify limited skills into highly saleable properties.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Personally, I never believe an artist saying "I do it for myself" is saying the truth, because why would you go through the trouble of making something that goes out into the world if you didn't care about somebody else seeing it? It's like the difference between those who choose "more comfortably termed entertainment" versus what people think of as the "art life," which is supposedly more monastic or spiritual. I don't believe in those distinctions.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world and I don't know whether fancy being slagged off by the literary world as well. It's just too much.

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

Nearly a half-century on from feminism, simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act. And getting one's work shown continues to be met by enormous inbuilt resistance.

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

Through my friend Tony Shafrazi, who's an art dealer and an artist himself - he helped to show Basquiat and Keith Haring, and has worked with the Francis Bacon estate - it was really through my friendship with Tony that I developed even more of an interest in art.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.