steve locke

“My teacher told my mom that she should encourage me to go into art because I could be the ‘first black artist,’ “ Gaines remembers with a chuckle. “Of course, there was already a rich black history in art, but nobody knew it because it wasn’t taught.”

Carolina A. Miranda
“How the dense grids of artist Charles Gaines took the ego out of art”
Los Angeles Times, 3 March 2015

“You know, if you were at a party and Greenberg was there with his people in the corner talking, when you went over, they would stop. They wouldn’t talk to you. Maybe I was also shy. So I just kind of watched. I don’t know if I was happy about it but that’s what I could do. When you’re young, you wonder, What is this art world and how do I fit in?”

Stanley Whitney
”Stanley Whitney by David Reed”
BOMB Magazine interview, 1 April 2013

“As I became more involved in the making of paintings, I realised that one of the main ingredients in making paintings was colour and geometry. And in New York I found ways of proceeding to deepen my investigations in that area. New York was very much the place where it was all happening.”

Frank Bowling
From figuration to abstraction, Tate Interview, 19 April 2012

In my opinion Black art is a misnomer. There are black artists and they, like all others, draw from they experiences to produce artistic expressions. If this expression is non representational, it is difficult or not impossible to tell whether the artist is white or non white. There can be no doubt however of the impact traditional African art has had on the world of modern art.

Alma Thomas
Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001, Box 2, Folder 7: Autobiographical Writings, circa 1960s-circa 1970s

“We have thus, it may be seen, an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.”
W.E.B. DuBois
"The American Negro at Paris." The American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol.XXII, no.5 (November 1900): pp.575-577.

“It is a psychological error to believe that art stems from feeling only. Art comes from the conscious as well as from the subconscious—from both heart and mind. If art is order, it is intellectual order as well as initiative or instinctive order. Unfortunately there are people, teachers and students, afraid of the training of the conscious in art, afraid of the understandable in art. For those I should like to say that clear thinking will not and cannot interfere with genuine feeling; but it does interfere with prejudices, so often misinterpreted as feelings—and that's all to the good. As in any other field of human endeavor, so it is worthwhile also in art to see and think clearly in teaching art, particularly basic design. I have tried to organize a method which provides a preparation for all visual art, a practical study of principles underlying and connecting all arts.”

Josef Albers
U.S. Specialist Report: Report on a Course in Basic Drawing, Design, and Color Given at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, 1954