Ja'Tovia Gary

“Even in this cross-section of women that we spoke to, you had women from West Africa, you had women from South America, you had women from the south, like myself. You had women from New York City. We’re talking about millions of people all over the globe. Yes, millions.”

“It’s not about being exclusionary, it’s about centring who I believe are the most vulnerable people in society. The people who are my reflections.”

“to me, specificity is the name of the game. That’s why I named my show You Smell Like Outside. Only a handful of people know what that means.”

“That I should broaden and take their advice, to cut out my voice and hide my hand. To hear Simone’s ideas around autonomy and artmaking and audience and agency (Who is this for and why?) shifted things for me. When I think about my work, I’m always asking myself these questions.”

“They were making me feel like what I was doing wasn’t that.”

“My audience is primarily Black women. And I don’t see that as small at all. I see that as quite something.”

“I wanted to be in charge of directing the story, creating the narrative. It was very much about snatching that bag.”

“When you’re in a BFA program, it’s like, ‘we’ve got to go hardcore realism,’ and either you’re going to be a slave, or you’re going to be a cook.”

“There was Shakespeare, there was costume design, there was Greek theatre. Musicians, painters, ceramic artists, dancers. There were a bunch of older Black women teachers. They knew all about the Black female literary tradition, the Black theatrical tradition. So you’re just being poured into. I’m cutting off my hair, I’m going natural. I’m having this awakening. Being affirmed. Like ‘Of course this can be your life,’ being an artist. It can be a liberatory act, it can be an act of transformation.”

“There was no gym, there was enhanced improve.”

“Most people are really artistic and creative as children and they kind of wander away from it, they have to, you know, settle.One of our favourites was Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson.”

“I feel like that’s very much a bedrock for a lot of the work that I do now.”

“I was raised by preachers and I have a really intense spiritual practice. I do not see this as just me out here flexing. I’m very much a vessel for something else to move through. It’s something that I pray about every day — that it is sustained, and that it sustains me.”

“I’m very excited for all of the doors that are opening and the ways that the work is received and experienced, I’ve been at this for a minute. I was waiting tables. It’s not something that I take lightly. I try to stay humble about it because things can change. I remember what it took to get here.”

“If stories are how we formulate reality—how we make sense of our experience here—but they all follow the same outline, then by changing the form, I’m modeling that you can create a reality radically different from the one you exist under.”

“If experimental wasn’t marginalized and diminished, I would have no problem being called experimental.”

“Using what you have to make what you want, I’m obsessed with the notion that the idea of the thing outweighs the materials.”

“I want to expand our thinking of what reality could be and what the past is and what our position is, My goal is to world-bend, to shape our perception, and to challenge our long-held positions.”