Of Occupy Wall Street, Art and Design

The top news for the past cou­ple of days has been Steve Jobs’ pass­ing away, and the #Occu­py­Wall­Street move­ment. The move­ment start­ed Sep­tem­ber 17th and is still going on. There’s been cov­er­age about it but one can tell that its not the full-cov­er­age that we are all receiv­ing. Though, that is a sto­ry for anoth­er time and place.

Mean­while, from all of the recent devel­op­ments of it, there has been a surge of pas­sion­ate sto­ry-telling be it in a form of a tweet, an inter­view,1 or a writ­ten, poet­ic “offi­cial state­ment” which was recent­ly read out by Kei­th Olber­mann.2

Anoth­er prod­uct of this, I must say, has been the print-design work that has been made avail­able to the pub­lic by Adbusters. The one that stands out the most to me is the visu­al-art piece with the dancer on the “Charg­ing Bull”.

It’s a mem­o­rable com­po­si­tion of images. The Bull, “the sym­bol of aggres­sive finan­cial opti­mism and pros­per­i­ty“3 and Wall Street, has been pranced on by a beau­ti­ful, gra­cious dancer. I think the dancer rep­re­sents the ebb and flow of the Amer­i­can Dream, and that of civ­il lib­er­ties. Now on top, it is on pace to take con­trol of the bull, not force­ful­ly, but with grace and seren­i­ty. She leads the way to suc­cess and finds her­self on the bull because of how she approached the chaos; not with vio­lence or vengeance, which in this case is rep­re­sent­ed by the smoky scene and masked crowd in the back­ground. Well, that is how I inter­pret this piece any­ways; it can be dif­fer­ent to yours.

Con­tin­u­ing, oth­er ones that I like are:

You may see more works here.

Update
In case you have seen in the news or in bookstores/newsstands, Time Mag­a­zine’s Per­son of the Year for 2011 is “The Pro­tes­tor”.

The art­work was cre­at­ed by none oth­er than Shep­ard Fairey. Here is the back­ground sto­ry of the piece.

  1. Watch Jesse LaGra­ca, from Occu­py Wall Street, talk to Fox News here. []
  2. Here’s the post of Kei­th Olber­mann read­ing out that state­ment by the NY Gen­er­al Assem­bly, video and tran­script. []
  3. Via Wikipedia. []

4 Comments

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  1. claude

    I find your point of view veeeeery inter­est­ing and well pull togeth­er, I´m in my last semes­ter of graph­ic design and Im doing my the­ses about non tra­di­tion­al cam­paing includ­ing the ones from adbusters, con­grats! this real­ly helped me.

    • sherwin

      Hey Claude,

      Thanks for the kind and insight­ful com­ment. Well appre­ci­at­ed. Good luck with your the­sis, and con­grats in advance with your last semes­ter ^^ Be well, and I hope you inspire oth­ers with your future work.

      Kind regards,
      Sher­win