ABOUT IRENIC
Irenic Projects promotes the visual and performing arts within progressive and inclusive religious organizations.
Irenic Projects makes no statement about the existence of God (but it leans atheistic or agnostic).
Belief in a deity or adherence to a faith system is not required to participate in the work of Irenic Projects.
MISSION STATEMENT
Irenic Projects was founded to create a network of diverse and mutually supportive creative communities and inclusive religious groups. By finding commonalities across traditional divides, these groups can work together toward common goals: promoting sustainable living practices, lessening hostility and aggression, fighting antisemitism, and promoting more humane systems that foster dignity and justice to people and the earth. Irenic Projects empowers churches to operate more like community centers by bringing art into sacred spaces - not to elevate the art but to activate the church.
Reimagining religious places as community-centered institutions offers cultural and intellectual nourishment to underserved neighborhoods. Irenic Projects partners with religious institutions offering support and guidance in creating space for contemporary artists on their campuses. Visual artists and musicians need low-cost studios and rehearsal space, and they bring with them communities rich with curiosity, care, and creative vigor.
Irenic Projects blurs the boundary between who is in and who is out when it comes to religious space and art. The church on the corner should feel like a welcoming space to everyone, an extension of their home. Contemporary artists should have more opportunities to engage audiences outside of the market driven gallery and collector base. There is often a day of the week reserved for like-minded faithful believers to gather. But what of the six other days in the week? Those days are when we can widen the circle, expanding religious practice and participation in religious life, building new alliances in the pursuit of a sustainable future.
PHILOSOPHY OF GOD
Irenic Projects is invested in the origins, development, and ongoing maintenance of the idea of God. The idea of God is not a supernatural deity. It is a philosophical concept with very real practical, social, political, communal, and future building consequences. When the religious realms of society are neglected by progressives, they become hot beds for religious extremism and fascism. Religion is a persistent force in the world, and everyone should feel empowered to engage with the ideas, even if they themselves are not conventionally religious.
PHILOSOPHY OF PEOPLE
Irenic Projects is inclusive and fiercely protective of all ethnicities, gender expressions, sexual orientations, countries of origin, ages, and abilities. Irenic Projects is NOT necessarily protective and inclusive of all religions and beliefs: in so far as someone’s religious beliefs cause them to actively exclude or oppress the above mentioned peoples, or creates categories of acceptability and belonging based on damaging moral systems, Irenic Projects cannot condone.
KUUY (GUEST) ACCOUNTABILITY COMMITMENT
The work of Irenic Projects takes place on the traditional ancestral and stolen lands of the Tongva peoples.
Acknowledging this fact is only the first step toward meaningful reparation.
As a guest institution on Tongva land, Irenic Projects make kuuy nahwá'a, a recurring guest exchange, to the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, the Tongva-led org who received the first return of land back to Tongva people. We invite you to join us in making an institutional and/or personal kuuy nahwá'a to the Tongva Conservancy who is creating community and housing Native people, practicing ceremony, and rematriating land.
In an effort to go beyond a Land Acknowledgement, which raises awareness but can start to function as a penance (like saying a 'Hail Mary' for a past theft but keeping the wealth of the plunder), Irenic Projects believes in "Paying Rent" to the TTPC by donating 1% of all income streams.
Furthermore, it is important to state that visual art often functions as a luxury item in a Predatory Economic Extraction System, greasing the wheels of those in positions of power and prestige to further their status, wealth, and overextended claims to (what should be) public resources. Contemporary art should be more than a parlor game in the hands of those who benefit most in this economy built on stolen land and involuntary servitude.
Irenic Projects seeks to exhibit local artists and help imagine viable forms of livelihood and community that exist on the fringes of the dominant economy of gallery --> collector --> museum --> storage facility --> tax evasion --> underfunded public resources.
Irenic Projects is a project of Fulcrum Arts’ Emerge Fiscal Sponsorship Program