A Quote by Ryan McGinley

In college, all my friends were graffiti writers, but I never wrote graffiti. I wanted to participate and do something cool on the street, so I'd make these portraits of people. I'd isolate them on a white wall, make a silkscreen of it, and do these portraits in bathrooms and all around. That's how I started the Polaroids.

Ryan McGinley

Quote Topics

All My Friends Around College Cool Friends Graffiti How Isolate Make My Friends Never Participate People Polaroids Portraits Something Started Street Them Wall Wanted Were White Writers Wrote

Quote Author

Ryan McGinley
American - Photographer
Born: October 17, 1977

Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn't become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you're the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.

Banksy

Graffiti is art, but you don't see graffiti in the National Gallery. Graffiti is on the street - that's where it belongs.

Jme

Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.

Banksy

I thought, 'Well, I'll amuse people a little bit.' During lunch hour, while everyone was off to the faculty club and this and that, I set up a bunch of bases down the hallway of the school and I put all of the portraits I had completed... and I waited for the reaction.... that's how I got started again, doing portraits of people around me.

Joe Fafard

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.

Banksy

All the work I did was to challenge politics, culture, and women's rights. I felt like I really wanted to break out. That's why I wanted to use graffiti. It's more open. I don't need people to come to an exhibition. Graffiti gives a voice to the walls.

Malina Suliman

Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.

Brad Holland

I love graffiti because it enables kids from every social extraction to do something that brings them closer to art, when they normally wouldn't be stimulated to be visually creative. Graffiti helps to develop an awareness of immediate expressive and uncontrolled freedom.

Barry McGee

As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.

Annie Leibovitz

I had just been doing graffiti around New York and this real estate investor guy had walked through meat packing in New York and saw some of my graffiti. He was impressed and asked if I sold canvases. I really had not made any canvases of my graffiti work yet, but told him I could make one for him. He then commissioned me to make ten paintings and put on my first art show. Between the sold out show and the cops chasing after me it created a lot of media and I've been doing really well since then.

Alec Monopoly

I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.

Rineke Dijkstra

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

Robert Montgomery

Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward.

Ben Eine

Street artists want to add something to the environment. They consider the audience, whereas graffiti writers don't care about anyone except themselves, they do it purely for the kick.

Ben Eine

One piece of graffiti doesn't mean much. Forty pieces of graffiti might mean something... It's all about connecting the dots.