Women Artists

"I employ assemblage when working with objects."

"I combine household implements with varying counterparts, but retaining the objects’ functionality so as not to render them mute. In these works, I address the implications of the juggling acts we perform as we adapt, modify, and are, in turn, modified by the devices and power systems that define our environments."

"“When the work is rich and has well thought out intentions, it will make its way to the places it will.”"

"It was said that the saints are loyal and that he is a saint dedicated to me About his brother."

"I committed to art because it was one of the most prominent things in my surroundings as a child – my mother being an interior designer, my father an architect. Still, I remember my mother’s fabrics and my father’s drawings in my mind years later."

"Because “dreams” are supposedly uncanny and impossible. My piece Tortoise and the birds opens the conversation about experiencing cultural amnesia which colonized peoples often experience. It also highlights hindrances that result from loss of cultural queues and history."

"I believe my identity is informed and evolves through learning and existing."

""When it comes to people, I am inspired specifically by people who exist transparently and are passionate to see others and allow space for them to speak their truths without interruption."

"“I personally think that physical fairs are important for the role they play in helping collectors to discover new artists, which they can then buy online later on,”"

"“I think interest will only continue to grow as the art world learns that Africa is a huge continent with a huge variety of cultures and stories and people.”"

"You don’t get to dictate the terms under which the work you put out there is received. “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” is an extremely directed body of work. This trilogy that I did, [it was all about] what’s wrong with the art world, and what we need to do to remedy it. That work became so popular that it just took over. It’s been a bit of a struggle to get the other work—which is more what I consider the core of what I’m about, the anti-binary argument and all that—that’s a little bit harder to establish, I’ve found. "Lorraine O'Grady Has Always Been a Rebel" The New Yorker (interview by Doreen St. Felix published on September 29, 2022)"

"At the time of my writing, 30 years ago, I felt the works of artists like Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Tanning were not sufficiently known or appreciated. The Bulletin provided a way of bringing these artists to the attention of a much wider audience. (about the importance of the Women's Art Register Bulletin and her own regular column ‘A Look At Books’ in it)"

"There is not nearly enough change here, the men have not kept up with the women's movement. In America I found that male artists used feminist ideas in their work. I don't see that here at all. (Hillcoats' experience with the women's movement whilst living and working in North America versus Australia)"

"Women artists need to consider the basic attitudes underlying censorship of women's art work and how it reflects a deep-seated fear in the community. During the past 15 years feminist artists have worked to change patriarchal attitudes towards women. As well, feminist art historians and critics have re-instated many women artists lost in history and made their imagery visible again. The struggle to produce new imagery and to interpret and defend such statements and ideas has often been at considerable personal cost."

"For the past 20 years I have been deconstructing 'the nude' through drawing, painting and collage. Collage is a perfect medium for reappropriating and juxtaposing images from many sources and rearranging them as personal metaphors, analogies and ambiguities."

"My work is for my own pleasure and fulfilment. I like to give form to my emotional and visual responses and to explore themes which reflect my attitudes as a socially concious woman artist."

"When I've travelled I've been attracted by the human presences imprinted in inanimate objects and structures and I prefer the freedom and directness of watercolours to recall these associations. (discussing the merits of watercolour as an art medium)"

"Both. I think it causes problems, but it's something we must work with, as the North American women did. They included everyone instead of being exclusive. They had so much energy, and they were going parallel to the women's movement. It's a very difficult time now in Australia. We don't want to identify with North America because Australian women have a very different experience. (reflecting on her experience living and working in North America versus Australia, and as a direct answer to the questions: How do you feel at the thought of having contact with women in a Women's Art Movement who are not feminists? Does that seem exciting, or do you see it as causing a lot of problems?)"

"Women are the consumers in society, but they are also the consumed. My purpose in the work (Down Under Among The Women) is to confirm more than to deny and if women are still portrayed as sex objects in art and society, my aim is to recreate them as sex subjects. I use sexual imagery in the context of the female body in an attempt to reveal the tragedy and comedy of women's lives."

"Science didn’t interest me at school but I found science as related to ceramics, geology and alchemy to be very intriguing. I think we don’t always choose our influences, they somehow choose us."

"concurrently victims and aggressors, their weapons are their vicious claws and beaks, but their wings have been replaced by brightly coloured targets"

"The target was on the bird originally as a decorative device which derived from my tapestry designs in 1973."

"While we endeavour to assist our Clients as much as possible, we require artwork(s) to be delivered and/or collected from our premises by the Client."

"The cost for this will be for the Client’s account, with an additional Handling Fee of 15% charged on top of the Service Provider’s invoice."

"What we must be careful of is not to be afraid of our borrowings. I think myself that there is a sort of over-anxious desire for national art in this country."

"Literally the stuff of everyday life is transmogrified into large-scale, vibrant works that combine painting and collage in a style that is instantly recognisable."

"After some time I lost the desire to paint the prison and its inmates — the whole place disgusted me. I began to paint what nature there was behind bars, as we did have some gardens, trees and flowers. I was fascinated by a tree that was near the barbed wire - I’d paint it in every season, and such meticulous attention to a single object taught me a lot. If I’d be outside the prison I never would have painted just that one tree. My fellow inmates even named the tree after me; they called it ‘Inji’s tree."

"There was a small tributary of the Nile where sailboats would pass by. We would watch from inside the prison as the sails caught the wind and men climbed up the masts to tie them down. Seeing the wind in the sails stirred many sorrows in me, and sparked an uncontrollable desire for freedom.. I obtained permission from the General Manager to go up to the roof of the warehouse..[and] when the boats appeared [the other inmates] cried out ‘The boats are here!’ I painted many pictures of sailboats, depicting our immobility against the movement of the sails."

"Some two or three months after I arrived in prison [in 1959], I felt a desire to paint and with it came a refusal to surrender to the status quo…I would go up to the roof of the building to paint anything I could find, eventually painting the inmates."

"One of the most important subjects I painted from inside the prison was Inshirah, who had been sentenced to death, but her execution had been postponed for one year until her child was weaned. Those sentenced to be executed were placed in a cell under special guard so they wouldn’t commit suicide, and they wore red uniforms. While awaiting Inshirah’s execution, I felt the massive tragedy of her story, as she had killed and stolen under the pressure of extremely harsh conditions and overwhelming misery. When I asked to paint her, the director [of the prison] told me that it would be very depressing. I did indeed paint her and her son - this was one of the paintings that were confiscated by the Criminal Investigations Department."

"Millions of people had been uprooted by the war and could not adapt themselves to a new way of life. On the other hand, certain people had grown rich and powerful."

"Only one thing is certain. People get out of life exactly what they put into it."

"I well remember the time, after the First World War, when one needed a tillion-mark note to buy a dozen eggs. Since paper, however, was still valuable, the bank notes were stored in gigantic silos which stood in the yards of our factories. In these we children made tunnels and played among the billions and trillions — a strange introduction to money, but perhaps it helped me to realize how worthless it can become when man-made values change."

"Роблю сонячні квіти, бо люблю людей, роблю на щастя людям, щоб квіти мої були, як саме життя народу, щоб усі народи один одного любили, щоб люди жили, як квіти б цвіли б на всій землі."

"'It's absolutely the best date that I've had. No one is going to live up to that. This wasn't on my bucket list but let's just end the list now. There's nothing that's going to beat this.'"

"'I asked about his wedding and he told me that he got to the point where he was just like, 'wedding planners, leave me alone'. He did say that he was really involved in his wedding, though."

"You'll meet many Gen Zs whose attitude is essentially, 'I'm going to work with a sense of purpose or not at all,'"

"leaders should understand that employees want to feel like their work has a purpose and act in that way. Yet, if we look at Gallup's research over the past 20 years, we can see the highest rates of disengagement, mental illness, burnout, and loneliness, which are not exactly traits that highlight being purpose-driven."

"You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube now.""

"It's not like the old way was working, and now we're suddenly loafing," she joked. "Instead, I think we're now putting work in the right place in our lives and getting the right social connections and support so we can do better work.""

"I'm telling you to have empathy, but I'm not having empathy for you". And I think that was a huge aha, is that if you were brought up, raised with this, give up your Saturdays, don't go to your kids' soccer game or cricket game, whatever it may be; work comes before everything, maybe get on to your second or third marriage because you've ground all your relationships to dust. That's how you become a leader, and then in order to lead, you've got to have your people be afraid of you and not like you and that that's what you were brought up with. This does seem like, "How could this possibly work?"

"You have to have empathy for folks and say, "I know you gave up all those things. I know what you went through frankly sucked. And the people who are coming along now that you're going to be leading are not going to put up with it, it's not going to work. So I need to have empathy and respect for what you went through, but I've got to tell you, if you want to be successful, you are not going to be successful with those tactics"."

"Let's say I'm scanning the horizon, and I might see the need to understand Chat GPT or generative design. And so, I bring that research back into the project as well as back into my functional home."

"Yeah, first of all, let me just empathise with you. I know it's not comfortable. I make all my audience say with me, "Let's all say the four scary words, 'I do not know'", and we say it together. And I say, "And I know you were brought up as leaders not to say those words. But what's happening now is, if you pretend you know and you don't, you could be leading your team down a very dangerous path. You have to acknowledge what you don't know as an opportunity to learn, because the first step of learning is to say, 'I don't know', because if you know, you're not learning"."

"Absolutely and we're seeing a shift in leadership too. So, when I would go out and speak, and I usually speak to senior level group leaders, the room would be at least half boomer. And now there's a handful of boomer, a lot of Gen X leaders, more millennial leaders and now we're seeing, at least in the US, about 12% to 13% of the workforce is Gen Z. That's going to be 30% by 2030 and they're an entirely different animal. They are going to change work in really fundamental ways that I think are ultimately positive."

"Well first, I think we need to dispel the notion that empathy means less, and I didn't really even understand it until I started doing these book tour interviews where people said to me, "Okay, so we've got to be empathetic, we've got to be nice, we've got to make concessions for people, let them do less and expect less". And I thought, "Well, there may be days that's true". Your dad dies, you have to put your dog to sleep, there are days that we have to be human and that's true. But no, that's not what I'm talking about."

"I say there are four shifts that a leader needs to embrace. First is a shift in mindset. You're not managing people and processes any more, you're enabling success. And to be intentionally provocative about it, I say, "You used to think of the people as working for you. Now, you work for them. You enable their success, because you're not going to get anywhere without their success". The second is a shift in culture. We used to, when we had the same skills and knowledge of the leader and the team, and then usually across the team, you could pit people against each other. Forced rankings, all those kind of bad ideas, Hunger Games kind of stuff, that doesn't work anymore. So you've got to shift from peers as competitors to peers as collaborators."

"I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled. Empathy ultimately drives performance. It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance. Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that. What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life. And we had agency over our personal life. And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life."

"Not only has it played out, it's gone from push to pull. So it used to be the employees pushing employees to learn. Now the Pew's latest survey on why people leave organisations, of course number one is compensation; people jump for more dollars, but that doesn't sustain. But with a net score that was the same, it was learning opportunities, because people realise, "If I'm not learning, I'm not going to be earning in the future". And so they know that's what makes them valuable in the future, and so that's becoming a real pull with employees."

"It's a huge shift and I gave a couple of talks one week to commercial real estate folks and they were all, it was mostly boomers, some Gen X, they were mostly kind of alpha dog folks, more males, one of them was almost all male. It's not gendered though but that was the case in this instance and they were like, "Don't you think we're getting woke, and aren't we getting soft, and aren't we losing our edge?" And I thought, "Oh, I'm not explaining this right, if that's what you're taking away from this"."