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The Occupy with Art blog provides updates on projects in progress, opinion articles about art-related issues and OWS, useful tools built by artists for the movement, new features on the website, and requests for assistance. To submit a post, contact us at occupationalartschool(at)gmail(dot)com .

Entries in Occupy with Art press (1)

Sunday
Apr012012

Chronogram Covers WS2MS!

Hudson Valley's arts and culture magazine featured two great articles on OwA's "Wall Street to Main Street:

Here's an excerpt from OWS poet Sparrow's piece:

“Wall Street to Main Street” is an art show in a dozen storefronts, plus a 10-week festival of performance and workshops, ending May 31. This is the first legal collaboration between the Occupy movement and a town. Catskill was chosen for numerous reasons: its proximity to New York City, its economic troubles, the presence of an arts community, and it’s the home of Thomas Cole (founder of the Hudson River School of painters).

“There are ‘Main Street’ issues that play out on our Main Street,” observes Fawn Potash, director of Masters on Main Street. “It makes sense to talk about those things here.” Potash was on the curatorial committee organizing the festival.

Since the police raid on Zuccotti Park, art has played a larger role in the movement. One cliché about Occupy is that it is “a protest without demands”—which is attractive to artists. For what is art if not a protest without demands? The community at Zuccotti Park struck many artists and critics—myself included—as a giant artwork, a “living sculpture” or “temporal work of performance politics.” One such artist, Jessica Eis, documented the encampment, the police raid, and its aftermath, with video and still photography in “Sights and Sounds of Zuccotti Park.” Emily Bruenig makes books from ephemera found at Occupy Wall Street: yellow police tape, stickers, flyers, etc.