Ceremony at the Pergamon Altar for

Restitution of Art and Culture to the Commons!

 There is a famous treasure in Berlin known as the Pergamon Altar. This giant relief sculpture from Ancient Greece depicts the battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods known as the Gigantomachy. It was originally hewn from stone by workers from a culture that celebrated victory and ethics.  In the late 19^th century, the Pergamon Altar was displaced from its original site in present-day Turkey and brought to Museum Island in Berlin. Since then it has been used and abused as a symbol- a representation of power by both Germany and the USSR.  The Pergamon Alter has come to symbolize the displacement and occupation of culture by the powerful elite.  A call has been issued for its return to Turkey.

International Targets: Round One Deutsche Bank June 13th     

The crisis of global capitalism requires a global response. We will now act against its leading institutions one by one. Transnational banks are central to this crisis and profit from the suffering of the people everywhere. Our first target will be Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank is active in over 70 countries in the world, creating complex local crisis in various regions. For example, Deutsche Bank is speculating on the lives of people in Southen Europe, using economic and political mechanisms to ensure the payment of odious debts. In the United States, Deutsche Bank is known as the "foreclosure king" for driving millions of people from their homes.

Arriving at the “Occupy Biennale,” the Occupy section of the Berlin Biennial, was shocking. Although interesting lectures and discussions were held in our ground-floor space, architecturally it was a sunken pit, a fishbowl. Visitors could enter and stand on an elevated viewing platform to observe the occupiers go about their activism. Seemingly unaware of the institutional frame within which they were viewed, the occupiers who had organized and decorated the space painted the walls with slogans and hung banners to create a kind of Occupy themepark. We dubbed the space the “Human Zoo.” The setting was complicated further by a very strong curatorial frame, based on Artur Zmijewski’s desire to display only effective political action, and not “art” per se. Zmijewski, an internationally renown artist in his own right, has a track record of using people as marionettes and creating ethically and politically ambiguous scenarios. We were afraid we unwittingly agreed to play a role in his latest piece, an Occupy time-capsule and tomb that historicizes and deactivates the movement.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Dear beautiful occupiers,

JOIN US ON RANDALL’S ISLAND* TO UN-FRIEZE OUR CULTURE

On Sunday, May 6th, Occupy Museums will hold our second Free Art for Fair Exchange-- a creative refusal of the gross financialization of our culture. This time, we will bring our protest to Frieze Art Fair on Randall's Island-- public land rented out to the 1% for a private island art speculation getaway. Frieze Art Fair, one of countless "Wal-Marts for art" creeping up around the world, enables the hoarding of art and culture, moving it out of sight of the 99% and into the storage units of the 1%.

WHERE: 16 Beaver St.
WHEN: Monday April 16th, 7PM
WHAT: Open Meeting & Discussion

Is effective political protest possible inside arts institutions?

In Fall of 2011, Occupy Museums and several occupy groups from Europe were invited by the curators of the 7th Berlin Biennale (BB7) to use the KunstWerke hall in the city center for the Occupy movement. Those who chose to take part, decided to create an open and participatory international exchange forum for the movement. Since then, hundreds of activists from Germany, Spain, Holland, United States and Egypt, among many others, have been working together to plan for the BB7 and have issued an open call for all occupiers to participate. The hope is to reach a new public who are curious to learn more about our movement, and open up new ideas and possibilities for working together on a global scale for change. 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Please join the Professional Art Handlers Local 814 and Occupy Museums outside the main entrance of the MoMA this Friday at 6 PM to ask MoMA to cut ties to Sotheby's.

Write up by Corinna Kirsch at Art Fag City:

Sotheby’s art handlers want MoMA to sever ties with the auction house, and they have good reason: MoMA has made millions at Sotheby’s during the art handler lockout. In November, MoMA auctioned off two paintings by Rufino Tamayo, a sale which amassed over three million dollars for MoMA’s acquisition fund.... The reason for this protest is clear-cut: the teamsters want MoMA to stop selling art through Sotheby’s.

There are at least four MoMA trustees with ties to Sotheby’s. There’s Jamie Niven (MoMA trustee and Sotheby’s US chairman), Richard Oldenburg (MoMA director emeritus and honorary trustee, former chairman and now consultant at Sotheby’s US), Danny Meyer (who runs MoMA’s three restaurants and sits on the board of directors at Sotheby’s), and Sharon Percy Rockefeller (former Sotheby’s Board Member and current President of the International Council for MoMA).

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRESS ADVISORY
March 12, 2012
New York City

Occupy Museums- Occupy Wall Street

The Museum of American Finance accepts a cultural icon of the Occupy Movement: Housing is a Human Right

Occupy Museums and Occupy 477 presented a model of a Harlem house slated for foreclosure to the Museum of American Finance (MoAF) on December 6th, the National Day Against Foreclosure.  The Museum, located on Wall Street just a block from the Stock Exchange,  initially turned down the gift by closing their gates to the groups, yet after a respectful correspondence, the MoAF Collections Committee decided to accept the donation.

Occupy Museums and Occupy 477 believe that the MoAF is an ideal home for an artifact that evokes how everyday citizens, and particularly low-income communities and communities of color, are being affected by current financial issues including the recession, rampant foreclosure, and predatory lending. The model of 477 tells a local story of American Finance.*

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Piers 92 & 94, New York City
Saturday and Sunday, March 10th & 11th
1-4pm
FB event page

Occupy Museums invites all artists and non-artists to join a mobile exchange art fair on the sidewalk outside of this year’s Armory Show in New York City. Participants are welcome to bring items such as paintings, drawings, sculpture, conceptual art, crafts, food, and other objects to exchange with Armory attendees and each other. We particularly welcome modes of exchange that are not based on profit.

Initiated in 1994, the current Armory Show shares a name with the famous 1913 Armory Show in which important avante garde works such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase were exhibited to the US public for the first time. While the 1913 show stands for the shock of the new, the current Armory Show stands for the economic shocks administered by the 1%. While unemployment and foreclosure continue to spread, the luxury markets, including Sotheby’s auction house and the Armory Show, have experienced rapid growth in line with the booming bonuses on Wall Street.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Occupy Museums with Teamsters Local 814 Art Handler’s at MoMa - January 27, 2012

Two weeks have passed since our January 13th action, in which we stood in solidarity with Teamsters Local 814 Art Handler’s Union in its struggle to end the lockout of the union by the billion-dollar auction-house Sotheby's. In light of the numerous ties between MoMA and Sotheby's, we demanded that the museum call for an end to the lockout by its corporate affiliate. 

As part of our action on the 13th, a banner was dropped in the second-floor atrium calling for an end to the lockout. The head of Security at MoMA coercively confiscated this now-historic banner. In a public letter sent to the museum one week ago, we called it a “unilateral acquisition” and stipulated that the museum accede to our conditions of publically calling for an end to the lockout to complete the acquisition. In turn, the museum called for us to retrieve the banner, stating that it was "left" on the premises, as if by accident. We know and they know that this is untrue; a rather disgraceful attempt to ignore an uneven acquisition policy, and the larger issues about concentrations of money and power in the art world we are raising.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

“In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.” ~ Albert Camus

With the whole world asking "what's next?" for Occupy Wall Street, OWS activists concerned with economic justice in the arts and in labor have announced plans to visit the Museum of Modern Art this Friday, where they will take advantage of the museum's waved $25 admission fee. "I tried going on Wednesday, but I couldn't afford it," said activist and art enthusiast Tim Gately. Although free nights at MoMA are now sponsored by the retail giant Target, the tradition was introduced in the 1970s as the direct result of grassroots activism by the Artist Workers Coalition. 

This action coalesces around a number of issues, from the cult of 1% luxury and celebrity promoted at MoMA to the museum’s close relationship with union busting Sotheby's. Come and experience a unique and lively evening. Everyone is invited to experience the museum as a true public forum.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

December 7th, 2011, was the National Day Against Foreclosure. Occupy Museums joined with Occupy 477 to build a model of the coop building at 477 W. 142nd Street in Harlem threatened with foreclosure and predatory lenders. We marched the model along a historic route, concluding at the Museum of American Finance (MoAF), where we offered the model of 477 as an artifact of how finance affects the everyday lives of the 99%. The Museum sent a security guard through their line of police to decline our offer, and promptly closed the museum during visiting hours. A week later, Occupy Museums and Occupy 477 sent a letter to the MoAF and its board of trustees reiterating our desire to donate the model to their collection. They accepted, and we are currently engaged in the acquisition process with their staff. A copy of the letter chain is here. 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

For the sixth action, we occupied Lincoln Center during their last showing of the Philip Glass opera, ‘Satyagraha.’ It was a glaringly obvious contradiction that the Lincoln Center would present an opera about the non-violent protest leaders Gandhi and Martin Luther King First, when Lincoln Center is heavily funded by David H Koch and Bloomberg LP, who is currently bent on dismantling the OWS protests, restricting freedom of speech and of the press. For this action, hundreds gathered at the police barricades all around the Lincoln Center plaza. We took off our shoes as a sign of dignity and mic checked a statement together. When the opera ended and people poured out onto Lincoln Plaza,  the opera audience was warded off from joining us by the police.  All of a sudden, the composer Philip Glass  popped up in the OWS crowd, and mic-checked a text from the opera three times.  This unified the crowd, completing the big assembly on both sides of the barricades. Many spoke including an opera singer from Lincoln Center who had been fired the day before on cutbacks. Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed were there and spoke. Finally, an autonomous OWS protester read a statement initiating his six day hunger strike, demanding that Lincoln Center open up its space to Freedom of Speech.