Top 100 Black Art Quotes
#1. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I'd as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#2. We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It's a basic protection.
Edward Snowden
#4. Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.
William J. Clinton
#5. The art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency.
Learned Hand
#7. The black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the 'Negro's' reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images.
Sonia Sanchez
#8. The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.
Jess Row
#9. The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#10. There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.
Kara Walker
#11. Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
Thomas Carlyle
#12. Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.
Romare Bearden
#13. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.
James G. Frazer
#14. I'm really inspired by the interplay of visual art and music, a total artistic environment where there's sound and visuals. When I think about that I get stimulated and excited. It's a feeling that you can't label with words.
Black Francis
#15. Everything I have is dirty, but I'm sure I can figure something. Maybe I can make a dress out of a garbage bag. Lady Gaga wore that meat dress to the VMA's, so I should be able to dress in a garbage bag. I'll get black ones, to symbolize my current state of mind. Like performance art of something.
Lauren Barnholdt
#16. If cunnilingus was a martial art, I'd wear my black belt with pride.
Jodi Knight
#17. Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#18. I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.
Rachael Price
#19. Owen remarked The basis of science and art is magical - vice versa, magic is art and science. It goes both ways. There's not ever black and white ... in magic or in anything to my way of thinking.
Luvelle Raevan
#20. I'll never understand the art world. But I kind of feel like there's been some art world/black metal crossovers happening for a while.
Mick Barr
#21. In art and mythology, the Goddess appears in three forms. White represents the virgin, red the mother, and black, the crone, or the death-goddess.
Erin O'Riordan
#22. Escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.
Charles Bukowski
#23. Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. "I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens," says Ingrid LaFleur, an art curator and Afrofuturist.
Ytasha L. Womack
#24. That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
Kehinde Wiley
#25. Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.
James Altucher
#26. Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle. And I am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.
Rudyard Kipling
#27. In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.
N.K. Jemisin
#28. My first film was a movie shot in 1974. I was 18 on that movie set. It was called 'Big Bad Mama.' I turned 19 on the next movie I worked on, which was a black 'Blazing Saddles.' I worked in the art department. It was called 'Darktown Strutters.'
Bill Paxton
#29. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
#30. Every time she meets him, she feels like he was a new paper ready to be drawn. And she could clearly remember how the first time she met him, he was like a sketch paper filled with grey and blue and black, all mixed up together forming a confusing storm,
Basma Salem
#31. My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.
Emma Ishta
#32. We make art. We do not feel the need to cut things apart to see what they're made of.
Holly Black
#33. For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
William Shakespeare
#34. It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.
Michael Stipe
#35. I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues,' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it, and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it.
Jane Campion
#36. The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.
Alice Walker
#37. If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art.
Gene Black
#38. I knew a girl and she felt like art.
Sometimes colorful, sometimes dull,
Sometimes with bright, hopeful eyes,
Sometimes only black and white,
But she was always a piece of exquisite art.
Melanie Sargsian
#39. It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
Stephen Greenblatt
#40. When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty.
Marlene Dumas
#41. The last void stone I'd worn was a beautiful black stone caught in vines of copper and silver. It looked like a necklace, a piece of art, really. This thing was spud-ugly.
Devon Monk
#42. The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off.
But that will not liberate Black people.
Amiri Baraka
#44. Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#45. Faeries are associated with wild untamed nature, with art, and with death - so the folklore is rich with different stories to explore.
Holly Black
#46. 1-2 out of every 100 students reach Black Belt and of those only 1 out of every 1,000 achieves his 2nd Dan
Mas Oyama
#47. The Black Book of Economic Development - The Clandestine Art and Practical Science of Building Local Economies" is a must-read for everyone in the industry who is seeking to make a positive impact on both his or her communities and the profession.
Don A. Holbrook
#48. While I enjoy teaching people on the basic and intermediate levels to work them up to advanced levels, my real talent is for the advanced students. You could say that I'm like a ninth-degree black belt in martial arts.
Frederick Lenz
#49. I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
Jeffrey Brown
#50. In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic. -from The Greater Journey
David McCullough
#51. My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there's a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in black people. The best example is, Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hiphop.
Questlove
#52. Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive ...
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.
Roger Ballen
#53. You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.
Rusty Schweickart
#54. Every true artist should look upon a review without judgment, anger or disdain, with the realization that the reviewer has exposed far more of their true selves in their words, than you have, in your art.
Robert Black
#55. A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#56. When you're a creative person and you create art with other people, whether you're married to them or not, you're going to run into creative conflicts. If you're a couple, certain inhibitions and barriers are gone. I have those barriers with other people, but I don't have them with my wife.
Black Francis
#57. I realized that I wasn't naturally born to good taste. I understand what it is, but I am happy to wear bright colors. I do have a few items of black clothing, but I think good taste and doing the same thing over and over again is what the whole art world has become.
Jim Shaw
#58. Of those who start TaeKwonDo training, only about 5% stick with it until they achieve the Black Belt Rank. Then perhaps 80% of those who earn a Black stop there.
Duk Sung Son
#59. People need new things to excite them, new inventions, new ideas, new art, new drugs, if there are no new things, then they resort to war
Robert Black
#60. Gay people represent art. Start allowing gay people to be beaten in the street then you allow art to be beaten in the street. History has taught us where that leads.
Robert Black
#61. We're told that independent film lovers ... folks that are used to watching art house films, won't come out and see a film with black people in it - I've been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that's not true.
Ava DuVernay
#62. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is that, white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black.
G.K. Chesterton
#63. Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.
Lemony Snicket
#64. There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.
Pat Oliphant
#65. Some people seem to have a black belt in selfishness ... ninja narcissists with no regard to how they impact those around them ... but at the same time, a master at the art of playing victim.
Steve Maraboli
#67. I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music ... the art ... whatever ... And I kind of went with that.
Lenny Kravitz
#68. Urban artist have to face the stigma not only from white Australia but black Australia too; that's horrific when people say that their art isn't "Aboriginal" if it doesn't have dots or lines or moieties in it.
Warwick Thornton
#69. I did pose for 'Black and White' magazine, a prestigious, artistic publication, several years ago ... I did this as a piece of art and make no apologies for the creative decisions I've made as an artist in my 20-year career.
Andrea Thompson
#70. Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?
Aristotle.
#71. Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.
Clyde Butcher
#72. Art corrupts. Absolute art corrupts absolutely. Please corrupt me absolutely.
Robert Black
#73. Punch a black belt in the face, he becomes a brown belt. Punch him again, purple ...
Carlson Gracie
#74. I don't have one specific tattooing specialty. I enjoy doing full-color new school, portraits, neo-traditional, realistic, black and gray, ultra detailed art, etc ... but always custom.
William Webb
#75. O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul that, struggling to be free, art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay! Bow, stubborn knees! and, heart with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!
William Shakespeare
#76. My main concern is that there is a balance in the system and that some art-based hip-hop can get out to the masses, 'cause right now people are not responding to what they don't know. Most people are just afraid to think on their own.
Black Thought
#77. I dug up some old John Buscema 'Conan' comics. Man, when Alfredo Alcala was inking, that was some of the most beautiful black and white comic art ever published. The stories are good, too, though early '70s comics based on Conan is a festival of sexist, racist stereotypes.
Ted Naifeh
#78. Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.
Steven Millhauser
#79. I think that many things that go on in an art school have a tendency to undermine confidence, and that shouldn't be part of the ballgame, ever.
Lewis Black
#80. I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.
Black Francis
#82. There's an art to making something look good when, on a hanger, it's just a black coat.
Daria Werbowy
#83. It would make me feel that creative art has a chance in this crazy world that we all live in.
Jimmy Carl Black
#84. Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.
Robin Black
#85. I would have artists be convinced that the supreme skill and art in painting consists in knowing how to use black and white ... because it is light and shade that make objects appear in relief.
Leon Battista Alberti
#86. I have little or no concern at how people interpret my writing, my only concern is to write it.
Robert Black
#87. "I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples" ~ Elizabeth Catlett
Melanie Anne Herzog
#88. I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.
Jonas Mekas
#89. A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#90. New Wave art was the rage of the eighties. Now it's exhibited in oldies-but-goodies museums, usually in black-and-pink frames.
Brad Holland
#91. Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Anne Sexton
#92. I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.
August Wilson
#93. I have perfected the art of the fake smile. Inside your heart may be bruised and black, but outwardly you look bright and happy.
Cindy Vine
#94. Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.
William Eggleston
#95. Baby, I love you. Pen ... More then I love the color black. More than I love cigarettes, more than I love books. Even music."
"More than food. More than art or stories. More than words ...
Francesca Lia Block
#96. The Minutemen were seen as more of an art thing than Black Flag, although I didn't see them that way. It confused people when we put out Saccharine Trust, too.
Greg Ginn
#97. I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.
Samuel R. Delany
#98. The riders, clad in crimson and black, stopped to scan the maze. Blaise shrank into the hedge, but one keen-eyed hunter spied him. He raised his crossbow, took careful aim and fired.
Teresa Flavin
#99. It was as though she practiced some shameful art: black magic, voodoo, or poetry.
Valerie Martin
#100. I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem.
Ishmael Reed
