Thursday's Three on Art

Today's Thursday Three are artists' quotes I've been saving and wanting to share.

✦ "Art really does open our hearts and our minds to extraordinary ways of thinking about love and peace. . . we can learn a lot about forgiveness from just looking at and discussing a painting with such a theme." ~ Ibiyinka Alao, Nigeria's Arts Ambassador to the United Nations and Author, Eternity in our Hearts: The Artwork of Ibiyinka Alao (Read "Our Beautiful Common Humanity", Curator Magazine, September 30, 2013) 

Ibiyinka Alao on FaceBook

"Visions and Vignettes: Paintings by Ibiyinka Olufemi Alao" at The World Bank

✦ "Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship to music, sometimes it needs to have all three and become a video projection. . . The work tells you what form it needs to take. What's important is knowing when to put your ego aside so you can see what the work wants to be. Being sensitive to the world around you and paying attention to your aesthetic tools. . . Once you know that you can make it, you can get out of the way. . . ." ~ Carrie Mae Weems, Photographer and Video Artist, 2013 McArthur Fellow (Read "Carrie May Weems by Dawoud Bey", BOMB Magazine, 2009) In January, the Guggenheim opens "Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video", a retrospective that will run through May 14, 2014.

Carrie Mae Weems at Jack Shainman Gallery

James Estrin, "The 'Genius' of Carrie Mae Weems", LENS Blog, The New York Times, September 25, 2013

✦ "The best way for an emotion to occur in art is the way it occurs in the rest of life. One does not live to have emotions, but one lives and has emotions." ~ Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), German Poet, Playwright, Theatre Director (Read "Critique of Empathy", Translated by Todd Cronan, In "Brecht Dossier: Six Essays on Painting and Theater", Nonsite, Issue 10)

International Brecht Society