Moma acquires Occupy Wall Street art prints

New York's Moma acquires Occupy Wall Street art prints

Occuprint Portfolio, a collection of 31 screenprints curated by the Booklyn Artists Alliance, picked up by modern-art museum.

Amanda Holpuch

Two years after the Occupy Wall Street protest began in New York’s Zuccotti park, the posters that plastered the city in support of the movement have found a home in one of the America’s major art museums.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired the Occuprint Portfolio, a collection of 31 screenprints curated by the Booklyn Artists Alliance and published in 2012.

Christophe Cherix, Moma’s chief curator of drawings and prints, said the museum had not explicitly been looking for Occupy-related artwork, but it came across the portfolio while looking for works that capture what is happening in New York and are representative of what the city’s artists are working on.

“We felt the portfolio was saying something very important in relation to New York, what’s happening now, and at the same time we felt the portfolio had a very interesting relationship to other works in the collection from different periods but that are all trying to socially engage with the public,” said Cherix.

There is no planned exhibition at the moment, but Cherix he would not be surprised if one happened at Moma or its PS1 branch in "the next few months or years”. Until then, visitors will soon be able to view the posters in the museum’s study center where the its other 75,000 drawings and prints can be examined.

Included in the acquisition is General Strike Match, 2012, inspired by the London matchstick girls' strike of 1888 and created by Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt and screenprinted by Melissa Dowell. Moma contacted Crabapple on Wednesday to let her know her work had been accepted into the museum because of its inclusion in the portfolio.

“I’m really excited that they are preserving Occupy stuff because so many amazing, brilliant artists created work around Occupy,” said Crabapple.

She said after Occupy, some galleries would enlist more established contemporary artists to create reaction works to the events at Zuccotti park. “I think it’s so much more authentic when museums take those artists, like the people at Occuprint, and focus on them instead of taking the usual suspects and asking them how they react to current events,” Crabapple said.

Cherix said it is better for a museum to acquire resonant works as early as possible, because they become much more difficult to find as time goes on.

“We have quite a large holding in the museum of things which can be seen as more politically involved, as posters and prints are often more specifically used by artists to bring the message outside the museum itself,” Cherix said. “We have a number of historical examples of that.”

“It was a way to create some kind of trace of memory of things which are often ephemeral in nature, because posters are usually glued over other posters are just discarded,” said Cherix. “But what we learn over time is that those things become extremely rare and have a great resonance with an upcoming generation of artists.”

In acquiring the prints, the museum can now reproduce them for the press, educational and other non-commercial uses. Crabapple acknowledged valid concerns among those worried about an establishment organization acquiring protest work, but said such conflicts are just one of the flaws in our “impure world”.

“Moma is establishment, but by the same token, we live in a capitalist system. Everyone has to make some variety of compromises to that and I think as far as problematic institutions, museums are not the worst of them, in any sense,” said Crabapple. ”I’d way rather have it acquired by Moma than by Morgan Stanley and put in their lobby.”

Molly Crabapple's General Strike Match has been acquired by Moma. Photograph: Moma Photograph: /Moma

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/moma-acquires-occupy-wall-street-art-prints