Eroding Plazas and Accumulating Resistance

Occupy Museums, Eroding Plazas and Accumulating Resistance. Mixed media. Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), 2016.

​Exhibited in Agitprop! at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum February 17-August 7, 2016

This sculpture is a mobile tool for planning actions and organizing responses to gentrification and displacement in and around the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The model also serves an educational purpose, as a sort of tangible infographic that maps the global financial dynamics that underlie displacement. It calls attention to the often hidden relationships between aggressive real estate speculation in Manhattan by the global 1%, hidden buyers, and shell corporations, and its influence on the rapid gentrification and displacement experienced in many Brooklyn communities.

Background Statement

Something obscene is happening around the Met. Opaque LLCs are buying luxury apartments at record setting prices while billionaire towers are rising on the skyline. The cash of a new global 1% class is gobbling up the prime housing of the big apple like never before.

A few miles away in the same city, something even more disgusting is happening around the Brooklyn Museum. Communities of color are being displaced in Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and Prospect Lefferts Gardens in a systematic way whose outcome resembles the forced relocation under South African Apartheid.

Are these Manhattan and Brooklyn cash-fueled urban transformations in opposition, or could they be related? What is the nature of this possible connection? What is the role that these two public museums play in generating the kind of value that turns living quarters into an asset class?

We believe that the processes happening around New York City’s largest public art institutions represents an extraction of public value (parks and art) into private assets (flippable real estate), and that the global capital being parked in Manhattan is the main catalyst for Brooklyn’s rapid gentrification as speculation spreads out from the outer boroughs in search of new opportunities.