Art is the absence of fear.
I view my hair and clothes as functional art.
I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.
When it comes to fashion or any high art, you have to have a combination of delicacy, along with taste.
I love watching Rihanna in fashion. I like to see her take chances and risks. I like seeing Naomi Campbell in the forefront. They're both women who stand out and use their bodies as canvases to introduce this functional art to the world. They carry it in a way that is very inspiring.
My fourth mother, my godmother, she passed away a couple years ago - her name was Gwen. She was the theater director over at the gym where I grew up and learned about all those awesome things I told you about already. She was the one who taught me terms like "upstage" and "downstage," all those technical things about the art of what I do - how to breathe what I see, how to move. They were all her tactics, not anything learned or given to me through a theory, but rather by her natural abilities.
I had the opportunity, as a child, to grow up in a community center where I was exposed to theater, music, art, and computer science; things that I would have never had the opportunity to even meet had it not been for those people taking time out of their schedules, helping us as children to travel all over the world while sitting in a gymnasium. That's what I did before I was a musician, before I was a recording artist, I was a teacher and a community leader.
We mainly focus on putting music, art, dance, theater, all forms of art, back into the community, so the community can put it into the world.
I take the same approach in all genres of art, across the board. It's intuitive.
All I want to do is give the world my heart... Record label tryina make me compromise my art.
I'll dabble here and there in different forms of the art, but the label has me locked down like a slave so, of course, I'll be doing albums during this time
I don't want to think too much about how I'm carving and what I'm carving - you are just carving away the excess clay and there's a piece underneath there. And it's kind of like getting out of the way. Maybe that's what the commonality is: It's getting out of the way so that the art can speak.
I love putting the music together. It's like art
I think we [with Riccardo Tisci] share a sensibility about art - we pull from the ancient future.
I think that when Riccardo Tisci wanted to bring more attention to the lack of African American presence on the runway, he also wanted to bring attention to the lack of a sensibility of African and Asian art.
In music, it makes for a good platform to take time and really mold a piece the way I need to mold it. When it comes to fashion, I create a functional art that moves.
We're all friends, inside the music and outside the music. I mean, we don't sound anything alike, we don't approach our music anything alike, but we come from the same genuine place. We want our music to be real and we don't want to compromise our art.
I know the community mostly for its art and culture... and of course its food, I eat at their restaurants." "They make you feel like taking off your shoes... it feels like home.
Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.
