Occupy Museums’ piece “Eroding Plazas and Accumulating Resistance” is a relief map showing the gentrification process around the Brooklyn Museum. It is meant to be a tool used in an outdoor action. In this piece, Occupy Museums teases out a relationship between ultra luxury global real estate in Manhattan and rapid speculation/displacement in Brooklyn. Both processes are unfolding right around the major museums: the Met and Brooklyn Museum. What role do museums play? 

The piece is a response to the Real Estate Summit Protest at the Brooklyn Museum on November 17th, and we are involved in a coalition that is organizing around this issue and calling on the Museum to no longer support the speculative real estate industry with its space and reputation.

From the Agitptop! curatorial text. “At key moments in history, artists have reached beyond galleries and museums, using their work as a call to action to create political and social change. For the past hundred years, the term agitprop, a combination of agitation and propaganda, has directly reflected the intent of this work.

Agitprop! connects contemporary art devoted to social change with historic moments in creative activism, highlighting activities that seek to motivate broad and diverse publics….These projects highlight struggles for social justice since the turn of the twentieth century, from women’s suffrage and antilynching campaigns to contemporary demands for human rights, environmental advocacy, and protests against war, mass-incarceration, and economic inequality.”