A Quote by Marcel Dzama
After finishing art school I was applying to stores like Home Depot and Walmart. You know, places where you have to take a urine test before you get your minimum wage. Even those places wouldn't hire me. So I was lucky when I got included in a group show at the Richard Heller gallery that kind of started my art career.
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Home Depot has never hired one human being for minimum wage, not one. We have always paid a premium over minimum wage.
For me becoming a painter was an Everest, in terms of what I thought a painter was. There are many roads to becoming an artist. For me it wasn't art school. I didn't have that go to art school and then get a gallery. It's more like, how deep is your inner library to cull from. It's certainly not about technical prowess, just about depth of investigation. It takes time. I had 15 years of painting under my belt before my first New York show. I was glad to have that. It's a good thing to spend your twenties getting your craft.
I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There's no gallery show or book or film. It's pointless. Which hopefully means something.
If Democrats are not showing up in those [rural] places even if you're not gonna win right away but if you're not in there at least making an argument that, "Hey, you know what? It's the Democrats who are trying to raise your minimum wage."
Movies are not an art form where you get to kind of sit in your art gallery and paint, you know? You don't do that. You're spending a lot of somebody else's money.
Art shouldn't be something that you go quietly into an art gallery and dip your forelock and say 'I have to be very quiet, I'm in here amongst the art.' It's here, art's everywhere. It's how you use your eyes. It's about the enjoyment of visual things. And it's certainly not for any one group of people.
It's funny to be discovered by a lot of people who didn't know you before. People always used to say, 'Do you shop at Home Depot?' or 'Does your kid go to such and such school?' They want to know why they know me, even if they don't know my name. I don't think that's a bad thing, by the way; I think it's nice to be kind of anonymously famous.
By the late '50s, something was happening in England, and it got to be quite exciting. The music world then started to explode with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was an incredible time with this mixture of independence in art, fashion, and the explosion of the pop sensibility. London was certainly at the center of it all for a few years. And as far as art is concerned, I think that sensibility of what was later called Pop art started in England even before America. And so I was lucky to be there.
I've been kind of lucky. I've always just kind of followed whatever my passion was, and that seems to have led me to better places than if I had followed some career trajectory, which I wouldn't even know how to start.
I started making art with art therapy. It's what I know how to do. I got a lot of criticism for that when I was in school. But I think it works for me.
I don't know what it was like in the '80s. I don't really even know what it was like in the '90s, because I was broke and wasn't selling any art. I was in a few group shows, but I didn't have a gallery until 2006.
The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.
Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.
Life is too mysterious to try to map it out. I've certainly lived long enough to know it will take you places you never thought it would take you - and some of those places are kind of wonderful.
I had no idea what I was gonna do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese-American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals.'
I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go.
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