I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box institution. It's kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.
Kara WalkerRead
I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art should engage viewers actively, provoking emotions and thoughts.
In this quote, Kara Walker expresses her desire for art to be an interactive and thought-provoking experience for the viewer. She believes that art should not be passively consumed; instead, it should evoke a range of emotions and immerse the viewer into deeper narratives, blending history, fiction, and beauty in unexpected ways.
Themes
ArtViewerEmotionEngagementBeauty
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the role of art in society to highlight the importance of viewer engagement.
More from Kara Walker
All quotes →There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.
Kara WalkerRead
Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White Being equated with pure and ‘true’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.
Kara WalkerRead
I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.
Kara WalkerRead
It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.
Kara WalkerRead
Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.
Kara WalkerRead
Similar quotes
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel DuchampRead
When you're a performer, of course you want an audience, but it's very, very different from courting fame.
Cate BlanchettRead
There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.
Stephen ShoreRead
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A. S. ByattRead
"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
Aldous HuxleyRead
I have gathered a posy of other mens flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.
Michel De MontaigneRead