Top 63 Black Artist Quotes
#1. Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.
Toyin Odutola
#2. You don't see a lot of black rock stars. The music industry tends to be segregated stylistically. It's hard for a black artist to cross over to rock music.
Lance Reddick
#3. Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.
Teena Marie
#4. Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.
Kerry James Marshall
#5. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.
Langston Hughes
#6. The black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the 'Negro's' reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images.
Sonia Sanchez
#8. When I saw Adele, I thought: 'I'll give it an hour before people say I was her,' just because I was fat. When you watch 'X Factor,' you can bet your bottom dollar, every single fat singer sounds like me as far as the judges are concerned. Can you imagine if they did that with every black artist?
Alison Moyet
#9. As a black artist in America, you know, it is so segregated as far as the radio goes and how they position music on the radio.
Kelis
#10. If you're a Black artist, you could paint a wall of smiley faces, and someone will still ask you, 'Why are you so angry?'
Kara Walker
#11. This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson
or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter
has come up with.
Bret Easton Ellis
#12. In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.
Solange Knowles
#13. I wanted to be the perfect artist. I'd do three hours of media interviews a day, going to every radio station I could squeeze in. I'd sign autographs after the show until everybody left.
Clint Black
#14. 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
#15. Let's get one thing clear between us, Shiloh. I would never laugh at you. I might tease the dickens out of you, but I would never, ever make fun of you. That's not who I am. I don't believe in humiliating another person. It's not in my DNA.
Lindsay McKenna
#16. Frowning, Shiloh forced herself to look up at him. Roan deserved her courage, not her cowardice. "You wanted to kiss me."
"I still do.
Lindsay McKenna
#17. Tonight I've been dealing with a known killer, a male whore, a scam artist and now I've graduated to talking to a mayor. Who's next? The President of the National Association of Rodents?
V. Alexander
#18. It's possible and available to any artist to be himself or herself on their own terms, to be accepted and embraced by black people. You don't have to be a thug to get love from black people.
Mos Def
#19. People just decided I was an R&B artist because I'm black.
Gallant
#20. I kind of rode this weird line between athlete and artist. It was a little different because most of the athletes were total jocks, and most of the artists dressed in black and were kind of considered a little on the fringe. But I hung out with both crowds in my high school.
Terry Crews
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
Alice Walker
#24. It's not true that voting doesn't make a difference. To check out is political suicide. This is especially true for our young black artists. You don't want to inadvertently end up doing someone's bidding.
Darryl Pinckney
#25. As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.
Ad Reinhardt
#26. I am shedding.
I am not a new me.
I am my old me in my new me.
I remain, carved with the soul of my knife.
My mess scattered all over my countenance.
I am me.
Take me as I am.
Malebo Sephodi
#27. 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
#28. Rather the artist's delight in what becomes, the cheerfulness of artistic creation that defies all misfortune, is merely a bright image of clouds and sky mirrored in a black lake of sadness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#29. Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.
Dave Grohl
#31. She was like an outline of the painting of the Holy Virgin that an artist has sketched in black and white, but not yet filled with colour.
Karen Maitland
#32. Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich.
Yuri Gagarin
#33. 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 Walker
#34. It's an incredible dilemma to be an artist of color and to always be in denial about that, saying, 'I'm a choreographer first and then I'm black,' when in fact, that's not the case. I'm black first and then I'm also a choreographer.
Donald Byrd
#35. As soon as I got into music, I tried to be a working, real artist who gets paid for what he does, who doesn't have a day job.
Frank Black
#36. I am a black British female artist, so I must be like Ms Dynamite, I must be like Shystie, I must be like Jamelia, but we're all different.
Estelle
#37. Alex has met them at the restaurant with his latest girlfriend, black-banged Lola, a performance artist who claims to have studied magic.
Ron Childress
#38. Some of my influences are black gospel artists so I definitely want to do a soul-gospel type thing.
Jonny Lang
#39. Fatima's hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she'd put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of
Katherine Boo
#40. When you hear my records today hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.
Pat Boone
#41. Every Iranian artist dreams of the black market. We don't care about making money.
Shirin Neshat
#42. The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.
Eric Maisel
#43. I was never an R&B artist. People coined me one, but that's because, especially if you're in the States, if you're black and you sing, then you're R&B.
Kelis
#44. There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.
Erica Jong
#45. Tis not your work, but Love's. Love, unperceived, A more ideal Artist he than all, Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes Darker than the darkest pansies, and that hair More black than ashbuds in the front of March.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#46. Here I am, the artist, the person, the black woman, and the stereotype. I'm using myself and it has nothing to do with my muses or other women. It has to do with me. You see parts of my body moving, very collage like, flashing, and not speaking, just laying on a couch, looking out at the viewer.
Mickalene Thomas
#47. Like a stage magician, the con artist misdirects suspicion. While everyone's watching for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he's actually sawing a girl in half. You think he's doing one trick when he's actually doing another.
You think that I'm dying, but I'm laughing at you.
Holly Black
#48. To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone
#49. Nowadays rap artists coming half-hearted,
Commercial like pop, or underground like black markets.
Where were you the day hip-hop died?
Is it too early to mourn? Is it too late to ride?
Talib Kweli
#50. She took his finger and placed a small kiss on the end of it. "You're just full of surprises, Taggart." She saw him give her a very pleased male smile.
"Stick around, Darlin', there's more to me than meets your eyes."
"Should I be afraid?
Lindsay McKenna
#51. I'm the 1st black platinum artist in Detroit, solo artist in Detroit.
Obie Trice
#52. Giving him a wry look, Shiloh said, "I think you're forcing me to look at myself, what I want, who I am."
"Good relationships always do that for both people, Darlin'. It's just a natural progression between them. It can bring out our self-awareness. It's not easy. But it's rewarding.
Lindsay McKenna
#53. I'm from a family of bankers and businessmen, and here I am, the artist, the black sheep.
Matthew Quick
#54. There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.
David Bowie
#55. We don't all have to take the same coordinates to get to the same destination. Being a young African American female artist, I want to open doors for young black girls.
Janelle Monae
#56. The record companies really do conspire against the artists. Especially the black artists
Michael Jackson
#57. I grew up as an artist. Science fiction allows for design and creatures and guns and all the stuff that I like as well. So I think most of the films I make, I'm sure, will be in that category. But I can also see myself making a film like 'Black Hawk Down,' and I could also totally do horror.
Neill Blomkamp
#58. He traced her arched eyebrow. "Every morning when I wake up with you at my side, you're more beautiful than yesterday.
Lindsay McKenna
#59. What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.
August Wilson
#60. Nothing can fix a broken heart except love. Love always repairs those fractures we get in our heart.
Lindsay McKenna
#61. 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
#62. On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii ... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#63. Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.
Lemony Snicket
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