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I am more likely to get paid for my art if it's presented alongside a white artist, so the questions around value and agency arise: What choices should I make, or do I have to make, if I want to be compensated for my work? Why isn't my art valued on its own?

Vivek Shraya

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Vivek Shraya
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More quotes by Vivek Shraya

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I used singing as a safety measure. I would pay attention to what songs the popular girls liked, learn those songs from the radio or library cassettes, and then accidentally sing or hum these songs in class. This would impress the girls, who would then defend me from the boys.
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I have dedicated a significant portion of my time and artistry to making art that addresses various forms of oppression, including white supremacy, misogyny, and biphobia.
Vivek Shraya
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I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.
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Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.
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When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to look normal.
Vivek Shraya
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I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.
Vivek Shraya
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When I was writing, I wanted every word to be not only deliberate, but musical. Precious.
Vivek Shraya
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Music is my first love, where my artistic journey began.
Vivek Shraya
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I would love to see more dialogue around the responsibilities of art consumers - how can audiences better financially support artists we love, artists who are doing the work, so that artists have a more solid foundation upon which to make art?
Vivek Shraya
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I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.
Vivek Shraya
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Should I be collaborating with artists of color solely because of their race and my politics? This question is weighted with my own worry that I have been invited to speak or collaborate solely because of my race, and not because of my abilities.
Vivek Shraya
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Making music has been connected to one of my greatest heartaches, because my own music has never quite connected with audiences. But it was this heartache that pushed me to explore other artistic avenues, like writing and filmmaking, and I ultimately feel most at home in a multidisciplinary environment.
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It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.
Vivek Shraya
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Children are receptive to talking about gender creativity, confirming the importance of the book as a means to instigate this dialogue at an early age.
Vivek Shraya
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Despite the fact that I'm not highly skilled in any visual art, aesthetics have always played a strong role in my art, including my first albums.
Vivek Shraya
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In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.
Vivek Shraya
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I am always hesitant to call myself an activist, mostly out of respect for the activists who are using their bodies and voices to protest or activists online who are constantly engaging and educating others.
Vivek Shraya
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If anything, I have witnessed the ways my art travels, or is rendered more accessible, when sanctioned by or connected to white artists.
Vivek Shraya
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Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.
Vivek Shraya
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Children's books have great potential to reveal new possibilities to readers, because the intended audience is at an age of genuine learning.
Vivek Shraya