Quote

I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.

Vivek Shraya

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vivek Shraya
Discomfort
Tool
Committed
Tools
Continue
Comfort
Art
Ignite

More quotes by Vivek Shraya

Image
I couldn't write about love without writing about hate - specifically, how the experience of hatred embeds itself in the body and prevents love from entering or leaving.
Vivek Shraya
Image
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
Image
I recently did a reading at an elementary school in Ottawa, and one of the children asked me if I was a girl. I said yes. Another child commented that I had a deep voice. I responded: Can girls have deep voices? There was a pause and then the group responded, Yes!
Vivek Shraya
Image
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
Image
Music is my first love, where my artistic journey began.
Vivek Shraya
Image
As a person of color, I know race can't be stripped from admiration or preference.
Vivek Shraya
Image
It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.
Vivek Shraya
Image
I didn't want to give the white reader an opportunity to think of racism as imaginary - a sentiment that is already a central barrier in addressing the problem.
Vivek Shraya
Image
I feel like I have had to catch up to the art I've made, and learn from the protagonists I have written, especially in relation to gender.
Vivek Shraya
Image
My art career often feels less like an art career and more like a career in educating, usually by using my body.
Vivek Shraya
Image
I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.
Vivek Shraya
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Vivek Shraya
Image
My interest in language is steadfast, but I think each project and its accompanying intentions dictate how language must be used.
Vivek Shraya
Image
As a brown artist, I have mixed feelings about my relationship to art and my responsibilities post-Trump.
Vivek Shraya
Image
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
Image
I have always considered the aesthetic of a project, including press photos, as a means to further the message of the art itself.
Vivek Shraya
Image
In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.
Vivek Shraya
Image
I tend to focus less on genre as a starting point and more on idea or intention and let the idea dictate genre.
Vivek Shraya