Art & Creativity Quote by Barbara Smith

The line reads like a gentle warning to anyone chasing a neutral, “objective” voice: it doesn’t exist, and pretending it does is its own kind of distortion. Barbara Smith, best known not as a painter but as a Black feminist activist and writer, frames art-making as an act of lived evidence. “Only” is the pressure point. It’s not romantic mysticism about inspiration; it’s a boundary marker. Your work will pass through you, whether you admit it or not.

The pairing of “experience” and “sub-consciousness” does double duty. Experience is the visible archive: what you’ve survived, loved, witnessed, been denied. The subconscious is the hidden wiring: inherited fears, internalized hierarchies, unspoken desires, the stuff politics often pretends is irrelevant. Smith’s activism has always insisted that personal life is structured by power, and this sentence smuggles that framework into aesthetics. Even when artists think they’re painting “just a landscape,” they’re also painting what they’ve been trained to notice, who gets centered, what feels safe to depict, what gets edited out.

Contextually, it echoes the Black feminist project of the 1970s onward: insisting that marginalized perspectives are not niche but diagnostic, revealing how culture is built. The intent isn’t to trap artists inside identity; it’s to make accountability unavoidable. If your subconscious is part of the brush, then so are your biases. The quote dares you to interrogate the source code, not just polish the output.