It’s time for the underground to break the surface, says Jo “22” Frias, the artist and composer behind Red Expanse. It’s a statement, not suggestion, that animated the label’s recent group show in New York. How do means of survival become silenced? When does action need noise? According to Inocentes, that time is now.

Frias founded the label and, now, publishing house in 2014 as a platform to release his own projects. Over the years he’s garnered a global network of like-minded artists, frustrated with the confines of commercial artmaking, and has kept busy making films, releasing books and putting on shows ever since.

Inocentes ran from March 5 through 8 in Downtown Manhattan, marking a major meeting of minds for the indie publishing world and their artist communities. Curated by Frias alongside Pablo Jomaron of Red Lebanese and Alien Libros’ Javier Salmon, the show gathered 21 artists from around the world — including Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Ari Marcopoulos, Gogy Esparaza and Malik Sidibé — bound by a mutual passion for artistic resistance and freedom of expression.

“What this exhibition offers is what remains to us: visual poetry and expressions of fantasy, belief and love…Standing for. Standing against.”

“In many ways, we are all innocents in the face of the violence that defines today’s world,” the exhibition text reads. Its titular theme, often tied to chastity and virtue, is well paired with pieces embodying revolt and friction. “What this exhibition offers is what remains to us: visual poetry and expressions of fantasy, belief and love…Standing for. Standing against.”

Many works channeled the purity and intuitive clarity of childhood. A photo installation by Kaila Ozuna sees children playing with toy soldiers and a white dove in flight, wings outstretched. Daniel Derro’s tender “Baby wise” print on silk drifts overhead, while “Los Quince” by Sthephany Pattano evokes warmer, sentimental memories of youth.

Elsewhere takes a darker turn in a messier, fleshier reflection of our contemporary world. Ropes cut into Joachim’s plush sculptures. Casino coin pushers and jail games by Estética del Crimen play on systems of punishment and reward. “Katarsis” from Romeiro Cruz layers scenes of youth into overlapping fragments, each vignette pressing against the next like competing memories.

“The show is the unification of independent groups that have accepted commitment for only currency.”

Innocence, here, is not passive. It’s having hope of brighter days ahead because the future might still belong to those willing to take matters into their own hands. “Inocentes is setting the precedent that independence is not a pipe dream,” says exhibiting artist Chems. “When talented individuals come together under a common cause, they can move mountains.”

The collaborative, punkish attitude that helms show also reflects a longer-running relationship between its organizing platforms, Red Expanse, Red Lebanese and Alien Libros, based in New York, Paris and Mexico City, respectively. Through the years, they’ve leaned on each other to put out works, books and mount guerilla-style exhibitions.

“The show is the unification of independent groups that have accepted commitment for currency,” Frias explained. “[At Alien Libros] we value artists’ spontaneity, knack and obstinacy more than their technical skill and erudition,” added Salomon. Another five-artist group show in Mexico City, according to Frias, is currently in the works.

“We can no longer stay low. We can’t stay out of the way.”

The case for the underground is summed well by researcher and featured name Joseph Cochran II, who prefaces an Inocentes artist panel with Byun Chul Han’s concept of “glass architecture”: little sticks in a frictionless world; the underground, then, provides texture through risk. Community through friction. “We can no longer stay low,” he wrote. “We can’t stay out of the way.”

“[The exhibition] rejects the safety of knowing your audience and instead builds something that answers first to the people inside it,” expressed Yasmina Hashemi, another artist on view. “It restores a condition for culture to exist at all. One where risk is legible again, where relationships matter, and where meaning isn’t immediately absorbed into the feed.”

With this eternal imagining, and reimagining, of innocence comes questions of deservedness and devotion. What survives after the world bears its teeth. The exhibition didn’t want to ease this tension, but bring to life stories within it: narratives of love and loss, and the responsibility, salvation even, that sits in their place.

Inocentes was supported by Carhartt WIP.