WS2MS: Update!

Click the image to check out the WS2MS PR kit (Stencil by Joel Richardson; Illustration by Paul McLean)

In the wake of Occupy Wall Street’s six month anniversary, small town America’s continuing struggle provides the backdrop for a unique art activist project, Wall Street to Main Street.  At the March 17^th premier, curious locals and out-of-towners enjoyed a perfect spring day visiting the 20 pop-up exhibit sites along the Main Street in Catskill, NY.  Walking along four compact blocks, visitors had time to talk and digest ideas in between installations.  This ten week expo features over 50 exhibitors, performances, workshops and seminars with a newspaper that serves as the project’s guide, The Wall Street to Main Street Message.   The day culminated in a party with poetry, prose and protest songs at BRIK Gallery where a comprehensive exhibition introduces the movement’s historical and global context. Artists and organizers celebrated at the local Thai restaurant with laptops open to a live webcast as Michael Moore held a press conference announcing a fresh wave of protesters flooding into Zuccotti and Union Square Parks. 

Wall Street to Main Street’s 8-person team of organizers woke on March 18 to news reports of brutal arrests and began thinking of ways to address the changing nature of the movement through the language of art.   Chapter 2 includes a zip-tie handcuff chain commemorating the (number) March 17 arrests stretching across Main Street, as well as panel discussions on food, energy and money addressing the practical and poetic in conversation with writers, visual artists, economists, farmers and visionaries. 

Artists to be featured in upcoming WS2MS events exploring new media include Mark Read and his shape-shifter van, The Illuminator, a mobile OWS library and cinema, and Mark Skwarek, who is using an augmented reality tour featuring Catskill’s cultural and economic story to create a digital fairy tale.  Old school media include documentary photography by over 25 artists including Susan Wides, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lucien Perkins’s powerful imagery of protests.  Several exhibitors works dispel the myth of drug drum deadbeats as the movement’s main demographic through portraits in photography ( Maddalena Ugolini, Vannessa Bahmani) and comics-inspired painting (Sharon Rosezweig, Andrea Kantrowitz) drawing clarifying images of and words by grandmothers, military members and even Wall Street workers.  Many exhibits emphasize design and radical engineering solutions, as in The Buckminster Fuller Challenge winners project boards, which address how environmental, economic and social systems work together. In the same space, visitors can take in the display of visionary local architect and builder Matt Bua’s  drawings of off-the-grid structures and Franc Palaia’s totally green eco-bulb demo. 

"2012 Space Transparency" by Maraya Lopez and Arthur Polendo.

In a village whose residents and leadership have mixed feelings about the grassroots uprising, overwhelming cooperation from village officials, merchants, neighbors and cultural institutions illustrate Catskill’s willingness to take a risk, its welcoming attitude and its confidence in the arts as a community development engine.  Wall Street to Main Street is Round 4 of The Greene County Council on the Arts’ Masters on Main Street (MOMS) program, started by local philanthropists forming the Catskill Arts Initiative as a driving force in the town’s cultural growth.  Initiated as a space-granting project featuring students and recent alumni of top studio art programs nationwide, MOMS collaboration with Occupy With Art, (an affiliation group of the New York General Assembly Arts and Culture Working Group) stretched the original mission and structure.  Advisors, board members, local artists, building owners and merchants recognize the issues at the heart of the Occupy movement as the important conversation of our time. Artists have played a significant role in the occupy movement and WS2MS recognizes that ongoing leadership.        

In the week following WS2MS opening, Main Street Catskill is seeing an increase in pedestrian traffic, lunch trade and real estate movement. M&T Bank is scheduling an April 17 auction of Union Mills, a civil war era brick property with over 12,000 square feet of Main Street and creekside live/work loft space, room for retail, restaurant, a small hotel, mixed office and studio space... A potential permanent site for an Occupational Art School? Stay tuned!

Update on Monday, March 26, 2012 at 06:46PM by admin

On March 17 , OWS demonstrators gathered for their Six month anniversary, were people re-occupied Zucotti Park. This footage begins around 9 O'clock,and shows the gathering that took place along with many arrests.The NYPD orders all to evacuate in order for the park to be "Cleaned". Many stayed and were then arrested. Here are those events.-------- Wonderful music by Ignacio Nunez- song is called La cajita de musica----------