The Institute for Abstract Savagery

"An aggregate of drupelets, bursting sweet around an acidic seed, blackberries and their color are inextricably entwined. My slightly stained lips and fingers do not register that the color on them may be able to cure cancer, relieve depression, and extend mortality. I certainly feel younger and happier eating them. Perhaps bears are an example in more ways than we thought, demonstrating with curious wisdom that berries hold keys previously unimagined."

from "Blackberries" by zachary

One of the tasks of an artist in the 21st century is to use institutions (schools, museums, etc.) without becoming institutionalized. Most fail.

"Our dreams can become real only when we fight the false oneiric messages and know how to wake up inside the dream, as Carlos Casteneda teaches."

- Moebius Productions, from "The World of Edena"

"Escapism and juvenile realism of some sort are the twin towers of the bourgeois American imagination." - Gerald Early

"Personally, I believe very much in the values of savagery. I mean instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.
..
I aim for an art which would be an immediate connection with daily life, an art which would start from daily life, and which would be a very direct and very sincere expression of our real life and our real moods."

Jean Dubuffet, 1951

"a pack of orcas chasing away great white sharks"
zachary, Note from 2016, Philadelphia, PA

"It is hard to take your eyes off the fire that burns deep under our feet. Everywhere. Under the crust of the continents and seabeds. It is a fire that wants to burst forth; and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, re****ed reptiles, and vapid humans alike."

Werner Herzog, Into the Inferno

We are currently writing a succinct statement regarding the difference(s) between Fine Art and Decorative Art.

"The history of ideas should never be continuous; it should be wary of resemblances, but also of descents or filiations; it should be content to mark the thresholds through which an idea passes, the journeys it takes that change its nature or object."
from Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.

zachary
American, b. 1981

Waves for a Concubine, 2016

Oil, acrylic, graphite, charcoal, and housepaint on canvas and wood.

Through symbol and savagery, this painting is a response to the violence that the artist is constantly, personally, experiencing.
This particular work helped to formulate some of the original ideas expressed through the art movement Abstract Savagery, to which this institute is dedicated.

Gift of the artist