Our organization seeks to take back the most powerful tool found in all humans — genuine expression. We seek to debunk the biases barricading the arts and to bring back popular culture. Expression lives everywhere. In our next-door neighbor’s home a young teenager carves images on the back of their skateboard; at the school’s play-ground, a street over, a young girl chalks the name of a family member who’s been taken away; Inside the local jail a man writes a line of his daughter’s mannerisms, yet we seek art in the wrong places, and reinforce the gates planted by the establishment.
We seek to provide a new entry to art powered by providing a space for poetry readings, gallery receptions, educational workshops. We seek to elevate Central-Texan artists who don’t have a platform, and to activate people’s appreciation for expression. To publish local writers, cultivate a local culture that connects local political issues with the arts to eventually create a sustainable cultural economy.
“When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds.
How do we begin to dream ourselves out of this dark place of death and destruction and war?
Now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations.”
-Excerpt from Freedom Dreams by Robin D.G. Kelley
Since the beginning of recorded history the arts have existed as a powerful invisible weapon, a right arm to any opposition movement. During the 1950s, and most of the 60’s, post-Soviet years, the United States waged a psychological warfare on artists and thinkers to carry the arts out of Western Europe and Marxism,toward a more “American Way.”
Today, the arts are gatekept by large institutions, kept inside museums with white walls.The arts have been reserved to a few elite; they’ve been disconnected from the root of culture, the root of all life: the raw sentiment of a human soul reacting to political environments. We are taught to revere what is on the best-seller’s list, to purchase art as a mere commodity of which we know little to nothing about.
Our consumption of art has become corroded by consumerism, and is based around the idea of celebrity and unattainable talent held by a few lucky-born artists. Artists are portrayed as martyrs who work in isolation and entirely outside of the social realm.
We have borrowed the name Infrarrealistas from the avant-garde literary movement started in Mexico City.
Photos:
Right: O.G. Infrarrealista Crew, 1975
Below: I.R. Founders: Cloud D. Cardona & Juania Sueños.
