138 Feminist Art Quotes

Following is our list of feminist art quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about woman artist.

Famous Feminist Art Quotes

The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff. — Cindy Sherman

I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality. — Diego Rivera

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained. — Betty Friedan

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings. — Cheris Kramarae

Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody. — Bell Hooks

Feminism directly confronts the idea that one person or set of people [has] the right to impose definitions of reality on others. — Liz Stanley

Feminism is the ability to choose what you want to do. — Nancy Reagan

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream. — Rush Limbaugh

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues. — Charlotte Bunch

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness. — Phyllis Schlafly

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. — Pat Robertson

Feminism means revolution and I am a revolutionist. — Frances Perkins

Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men. — Catharine MacKinnon

Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels. — Bell Hooks

Female Artists Quotes

In my view, Zhang Lanxin is one of our best female martial artists, and I can't rate her highly enough. — Jackie Chan

People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It's because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can't; it's impossible. — Marina Abramovic

Actually, I know for a fact there are some young female artists who don't even sing on their own records and who don't sing live. And that is pathetic. — Sayings

OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me. — Maya Lin

You got a handful of great guys - Ne-Yo, R. Kelly, Usher. You have a handful of great female artists. But for the most part the music world's changing and change is good. You have to make adjustments if you want to survive in that world. — Nas

I don't like being under someone elses thumb. I'm very supportive of other female artists, especially those trying to make their own statement... trying to do what they want instead of being someone else's Barbie doll. — Irene Cara

It's hard to be taken seriously if you're a young, female artist making pop music; you never know how people are going to react. — Alessia Cara

In the tradition of great female artists, Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Raitt, Christine McVie, Shawn Colvin, Sarah McLachlan....now enter Maia Sharp. — Art Garfunkel

A female artist friend of mine recently told me that she was advised to 'look more slutty.' I asked her boyfriend what the equivalent advice for a man would be. He said to be more muscular. That made me rush to the gym. — Mark Kostabi

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist. — Patti Smith

Woman Artist Quotes

The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins. — Joan D. Chittister

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters. — Georgia O'Keeffe

She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that. — Guy de Maupassant

I believe that all women are pretty without makeup- but with the right makeup can be pretty powerful. — Bobbi Brown

I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged. — Maria Callas

It was not very easy for a woman to impose herself as a modern artist in Germany… Most of our male colleagues continued for a long time to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status. — Hannah Hoch

I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens. — Georg Baselitz

If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color. — Mary Cassatt

The only thing I know is that I know nothing — Socrates

I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that. — Alice Neel

Feminism Quotes

Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated. — Saddam Hussein

We've got a responsibility to live up to the legacy of those who came before us by doing all that we can to help those who come after us. — Michelle Obama

When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose. — Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me. — Warsan Shire

Hate speech it seems to be is been defined by the political left as anything we don't like, anything that violates social justice doctrines, feminism, Black Lives Matter kind of ideology. It is not something that I have ever heard particularly effectively defined. — Milo Yiannopoulos

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself — Simone de Beauvoir

I think transwomen, and transpeople in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you're supposed to be to live a more authentic life. — Laverne Cox

There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women. — Madeleine Albright

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. — Adrienne Rich

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. — Sylvia Plath

Feminist Movement Quotes

It appears that America's anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men's movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening. — Jerry Falwell

My hope is that feminist, racial justice, reproductive rights and LGBT movements build a coalition that centers on the lives of women who lead intersectional lives and too often fall in between the cracks of these narrow mission statements. — Janet Mock

Trans women of color dangerously fall in between the cracks of racial justice, feminist and LGbt movements. — Sayings

The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang. — Barbara Ehrenreich

My parents demonstrated against the Vietnam war, they were into the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, they started the first vegetarian restaurant in Pittsburgh. — Justin Sane

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. — Caroline Glick

Gone are the days when reality fed the feminist movement. — Tammy Bruce

One of the biggest problems with the modern feminist movement is its failure to bring men along with us. — Tammy Bruce

The feminist movement has spent 30 years putting down the role of stay-at-home moms and trying to tell young women that only someone who is mentally disabled would pick that for a career. — Phyllis Schlafly

The feminist movement has far more anger for men than it has love for women. — Dennis Prager

Feminist Theory Quotes

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. — Catharine MacKinnon

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment.... Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it. — Martha C. Nussbaum

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies. — Camille Paglia

But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women's movement did not either. — Teresa de Lauretis

I am attempting to move away from the exclusionary practices of feminist theory, particularly anti-pornography rhetoric, in order to amplify the discussion about the complexity of pleasure for women. — Barbara Degenevieve

I remain interested in the potential of art, except I've always been more struck by applied modernism than high modernism. It's partly because of feminist theory and being brought up in the '70s, with questioning who is speaking, and why, and what authority they're carrying. — Liam Gillick

Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu. — Edward Said

Radical Feminism Quotes

All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman. — Unknown Author

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. — Catharine MacKinnon

Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies. — Andrea Dworkin

And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference. — Susan Griffin

Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that — Vivian Gornick

The feminism radical agenda has led to greater state intervention, hindering the economic process, giving a job to bearcats who have not contributed anything to society, examples are international organizations committed to pushing this agenda. — Javier Milei

We have to be careful in this era of radical feminism, not to emphasize an equality of the sexes that leads women to imitate men to prove their equality. To be equal does not mean you have to be the same. — Eva Burrows

ALL men keep ALL women in a state of fear — Susan Brownmiller

The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist — Ti-Grace Atkinson

All men are rapists and that's all they are — Marilyn French

Pro Feminist Quotes

The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. — Joss Whedon

Earlier feminists were almost universally pro-choice and have dominated political debate until now. Having access to abortion was viewed as the only way women could have full equality with men, who, until recently, couldn't get pregnant. — Kathleen Parker

I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘anti-men’. I’m just ‘Thumbs up for the six billion — Caitlin Moran

If a politician is running in your local community who's pro-choice, who's feminist in their thinking, get behind them. Send them some money! If you have no money but have time, lick stamps! — Ani Difranco

It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who. . .drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime. — Susan B. Anthony

I don't know about calling yourself a feminist. I also, for me, it's difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly is very pro-abortion in this context. And I'm neither anti-male or pro- abortion, so. — Kellyanne Conway

I strongly believe that no one can be a true feminist without being an atheist. All religions are anti-women. No one can be pro-woman while supporting anti-woman dogmas. — Taslima Nasrin

(T)he Left has moved so far to the left that this pro-choice, lesbian feminist is now considered a Right-Winger! — Tammy Bruce

Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly. — Theodore Roosevelt

Visual Art Quotes

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli

There is no must in art because art is free. — Wassily Kandinsky

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker

I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary. — Barbara Kruger

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan

Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life. — Steven Spielberg

In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. — Walt Disney

I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not? — Storm Thorgerson

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. — Julia Morgan

Avant Garde Art Quotes

If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age — Karel Appel

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. — Clement Greenberg

I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done. — Jeff Koons

You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. — Michael Scott

Avant-garde is French for bullshit — John Lennon

Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values. — Jamake Highwater

I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself. — Arnold Newman

I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level. — Steven Soderbergh

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. — Yayoi Kusama

Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde. — Stefan Themerson

Radical Feminist Quotes

Any man will follow any feminine looking thing down any dark alley; I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple; it would be good to put him on a serving plate but you'd need good silver. — Andrea Dworkin

I consider the Chinese government's policy among the most intelligent in the world. — Gary Bauer

The nuclear family must be destroyed... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. — Linda Gordon

Radical feminists have been making the pitch that justice demands that men and women be given an equal opportunity to make it to the top in the workplace. — Rick Santorum

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. — Mary Daly

The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race. — Sally Miller Gearhart

The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men. — Sharon Stone

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs. — Catharine MacKinnon

I propose that the phenomenon of love is the psychological pivot in the persecution of women. — Ti-Grace Atkinson

Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo. — Jodie Foster

People Writing About Feminist Art

Name	Quotes	Likes
Bell Hooks quotes on love, community and education	347	4449
Cindy Sherman quotes on art, life and photography	45	585
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes on writing, love and feminism	121	1142
Diego Rivera quotes on frida kahlo	18	1050
Betty Friedan quotes on feminism, state	110	1016
Nancy Reagan quotes on freedom, government and leadership	79	1758

More Feminist Art Quotes

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women's art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist. — Barbara Kruger

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. — Andrea Dworkin

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to. — Frida Kahlo

For me, now, feminist art must show a consciousness of women's social and economic position in the world. I also believe it demonstrates forms and perceptions that are drawn from a sense of spiritual kinship between women. — Suzanne Lacy

For instance, I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that's how I see life. I'm interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist, I can do anything. I can say anything. It's about self-expression. It knows no package - there's no such thing. That's what being an artist is. — Laura Nyro

Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human. — Andrea Dworkin

Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art. — Jennifer Baumgardner

Feminist art may... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme... should we call it 'joy'? — Andrea Dworkin

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due. — Camille Anna Paglia

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due. — Camille Paglia

We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de si?cle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way. — Camille Paglia

The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy? — Andrea Dworkin

We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de si?cle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way. — Camille Anna Paglia

Recently some work I made could be seen as feminist art or work that relates to the body. That's just what I'm feeling - like it needs to be done. — Kim Gordon

I didn't like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn't like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid - as art. — Robert Barry

I think that's my hope for a lot of the feminist movement is that the gender thing sort of stops being the selling point, if that makes any sense. We're just people making art, and that's how this process has felt to me. — Sara Bareilles

Very early on I was interested in doing political art, but it was not feminist political art. — Michelle Stuart

I never made "feminist art," and if I did it was not deliberate. — Michelle Stuart

The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture! — Adrienne Rich

I didn't go to high school, I didn't go to college, I didn't have women's studies. All of my feminist ideals and education have been built around art and my friends and community. And so it's still growing. — Kathleen Hanna

I think for a long time it seemed like working in an art form and being a feminist meant portraying women in a perfect, angelic light. And there's nothing feminist about that. — Rebecca Hall

Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives. — Andrea Dworkin

In Conclusion

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