“I try to make work that joins the seductions of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.”
Barbara Kruger
“I'm an artist, and a person who is political; I make some separation here. I do not represent that art is as straightforward and immediately effective as voting or doing community work, and I don't think art always can or should be pragmatic and utilitarian. At times, however, art can fuse a dreadful or wonderful reality with dreadful or wonderful representation so that people realize and feel what is, and then act.”
Jenny Holzer
“I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
“What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
Audre Lorde
“I generally resist the idea that there's something supremely deterministic, or supremely dangerous, about art. I just find that always to be coming out of a perspective that willfully misunderstands art – and the way that art in fact holds people in conversations, acts to limit or to reduce the sense of isolation and loneliness, that it raises difficult topics in order to deepen our understanding and build up our resilience.”
Junot Díaz
“I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.”
Käthe Kollwitz