I wanted to show the history and strength of all kinds of black women. Working women, country women, urban women, great women in the history of the United States.
Elizabeth CatlettRead
I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the purpose of art as a means of empowerment and awareness for a community.
Elizabeth Catlett's quote expresses the aspiration for art to serve as a mirror for society, reflecting the identity and potential of the people it represents. It underlines the idea that art should not only entertain but also inspire and liberate individuals, urging creators to focus on creating works that foster awareness and improvement of the community's condition.
Themes
ArtEmpowermentCommunityLiberationIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech at an art conference about the role of art in society.
More from Elizabeth Catlett
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The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
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Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.
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The artist produces for the liberation of his soul.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
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Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.
James TurrellRead