Image Factory Turns Twenty
The image factory turned twenty years today and it was a perfect opportunity for the founders of the art gallery to celebrate its contributions and achievements in the art world. The celebration continues tonight with the opening of a retrospective exhibition that captures the works of various Belizean artists in the past two decades. News Five’s Isani Cayetano reports.
Isani Cayetano, Reporting
Since opening its doors to artists, artisans and aficionados in 1995, the Image Factory Art Foundation has become a pillar in the world of visual and expressive arts. The gallery itself is a revolving door for painters, sculptors, authors and spoken word poets. At twenty years old, the creative space conceived in the eccentric mind of Yasser Musa is now home to the uninhibited talents of Briheda Haylock, Katie Usher, Gilvano Swasey and many others.
Yasser Musa
Yasser Musa, Founder, Image Factory Art Foundation
“There is no way that I could catalog the over two hundred books and publications that we have done or say something about the over five hundred artists that we have worked with. Artists, musicians, writers, poets, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, it is impossible. But what I can say is that these first twenty years should be an example to a society that is completely messed up as ours, that we need more, twenty more Image Factories, not twenty years of Image Factory. We need across this land for the engagement of the mind and the consciousness of the people in order to have a citizenry that is engaged, that is competing with each other in terms of their views and their feelings and their attitude towards the way they are living. We have tried to put art at the forefront of society. Obviously we have failed and I have absolutely no apology to make about being a failure but what I will not accept is this idea that failure is something to be allowed to defeat the people. Failure should be something that provokes and something that inspires and something that uplifts you to do better. Our intention going forward now, that is why we brought the young artists together. The intention in going forward now is to put some impossible ideas in front of us. The impossible dream is what makes people wake up in the morning and go for it.”
To commemorate the milestone achievement, an event has been planned for this evening.
Yasser Musa
“It gives me a deep sense of courage and a deep sense of wanting to help and to engage and to collaborate. That is a big word, collaboration, because we have come out of hundreds of years of this anti-collaboration spirit and we need to realize that to develop collaboration takes time. It takes work, it takes thinking, we have to think out these things. We can’t expect these things to come to us, we have to go for these things and when I say things I mean the expression of a society, the production of its valuable ideas, what it holds through to itself. The concept that it wants to perpetuate to its young in terms of what would be called education.”
It includes an art exhibition, as well as spoken word performances by up and coming poets associated with the BAFU movement. Reporting for News Five, I am Isani Cayetano.
