Surrealism in 2012:
Toward the World of the Fifth Sun
January 6 - February 19, 2012
GoggleWorks Center for the Arts
201 Washington Street
Reading, Pennsylvania
USA
Welcome to the SURREALISM IN 2012 website, where we celebrate the forthcoming Winter Solstice of Year 2012, beginning of the 14th baktun (cycle) in the Maya long count calendar, and the fifth rebirth of our Sun.
Whatever one thinks of the sound and fury generated by this event in the popular media, there is no doubting the astronomical and mythopoetic genius of the people who created this approaching historical marker.
Scores of surrealist artists and writers from many countries have sent their works for a long-awaited exhibition honoring this theme, in keeping with that movement’s principles of “poetry made by all” and solidarity with the indigenous world.
Held in the GoggleWorks, a new community art center in the centuries-old city of Reading, this gathering of creative forces in Eastern Pennsylvania represents the first collective manifestation of the ongoing surrealist movement in that part of the United States.
It is a rare opportunity to experience the stimulating atmosphere of authentic surreality apart from the academicism or media distortion so often identified with that word. It is also a good setting, right at the beginning of the storied year, to engage one’s mind with the meaning of a world bound for important, and no doubt startling, changes in the “World of the Fifth Sun” that lies soon ahead.
"The world never ends,
It's always the beginning."
--the Jayhawks
"It's after the end of the world.
Don't you know that yet?"
--Sun Ra