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(Re) framing museums/Occupy (re) framed: two Occupy exhibitions in the California Bay Area

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(Re) framing museums/Occupy (re) framed: two Occupy exhibitions in the California Bay Area

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Content Copyright 2014 Nicole Valdes Wallace

(RE) FRAMING MUSEUMS/OCCUPY (RE) FRAMED:
TWO OCCUPY EXHIBITIONS IN THE CALIFORNIA BAY AREA

by

Nicole Valdes Wallace

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
(Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere)

May 2014
ii

EPIGRAPH

“To the oppressed,
and to those who suffer with them
and fight at their side”

—Paulo Freire, 1968
iii

DEDICATION

To my father, Scott Koford Wallace.
iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to all who have aided me in my research for this project, especially
the wonderful artists, curators, journalists, activists, and organizers who took time out of
their busy lives to speak with me. Special thanks to Alex Abramovich, Sasha Archibald,
Li Chen, René de Guzman, Betti-Sue Hertz, Susie Kantor, Lucy Raven, and Martin
Strickland, all of whom are doing extraordinary work in contemporary art and politics.

My sincerest gratitude to my thesis committee: to Maura Brewer for your invaluable
insight and continued support since the beginning. Your painstaking efforts with my early
drafts helped shepherd me in the right direction and have undoubtedly influenced the
final outcome. Thank you to Noura Wedell for your thoughtful and engaged feedback,
and for your encouragement and interest in my topic. Your commitment to pedagogy and
critical theory is inspiring. To Jack Halberstam for helping me explore the larger
sociopolitical implications between art and activism. Your guidance provided an
important critical framework that has inspired my own.

Last but not least, this research could not have been done without the incredible support
of those closest to me, especially my parents Scott Koford Wallace and Patricia Valdes
Wallace, my older brother Marco Valdes Wallace, my utterly supportive partner Paul
Marion Wood, and all my loving friends.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………….

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………..

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..
ii

iii

iv

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………… vi

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….. vii

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter 1: Genealogy of Occupy and Activism in the Bay Area……………………..
1.1: Occupy and the Politics of Representation………………………………...
1.2: Independent Media, Self-Representation & Locational Artistic Production
7
14
19
Chapter 2: (Re) Framing Politics/Occupy (Re) Framed………………………………
2.1: Motivations for an Alternative Public Space……………………………....
2.2: Portraits from the Occupation: A Visual Performance in Multiplicity.......
2.3: Occupy Bay Area: Objects Performing Activism………………………….
22
23
25
31
Chapter 3: Unhinging the Museum…………………………………………………… 43
3.1: The New Museum Paradigm………………………………………………
3.2: The Oakland Museum of California: An Institution (for the People)……..
3.3: The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: A Kunsthalle Model………………
43
44
50
Chapter 4: Embodiment and Spatial Realities in Politics and Art…………………….
4.1: The Virtual is Physical…………………………………………………….
4.2: Presentation Formats through the Exhibition Lens………………………..
4.3: Exhibition as Pedagogy……………………………………………………
58
58
60
65

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...
69

75
vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Installation view of Let the Record Show, New Museum, 1987. 6
Figure 2: Occupy Oakland camp, Oscar Grant Plaza, Oakland, 2011. 9
Figure 3: Occupy San Francisco camp, Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco, 2011. 9
Figure 4: General strike shuts down the port of Oakland, Oakland, 2011. 12
Figure 5: Opening day/Public Screening, Portraits from the Occupation, 2012. 15
Figure 6: Rich Black, Opening Night poster, Occupy Bay Area, 2012. 15
Figure 7: Occupy Oakland Story-telling booth, Oakland, 2011. 20
Figure 8: Occupy Oakland demonstrator painting a protest sign, Oakland, 2011. 20
Figure 9: Screen shot of Portraits from the Occupation, 2012. 27
Figure 10: Screen shot of Portraits from the Occupation, 2012. 27
Figure 11: Exhibition view #1, Occupy Bay Area, 2012. 32
Figure 12: Jon-Paul Bail, Hella Occupy Oakland, 2011. 33
Figure 13: Rich Black, Oakland General Strike, Offset Print, 17x 11 in., 2011. 34
Figure 14: Favianna Rodriquez, The World vs. The 1%, Screen Print, 24 x18 in,. 2012. 34
Figure 15: Favianna Rodriquez, Occupy Sisterhood, Screen Print, 17 x11 in,. 2012 34
Figure 16: Steven Marcus, Free Speech Movement, 1964. 36
Figure 17: Exhibition view #2, Occupy Bay Area, 2012. 41
Figure 18: Exhibition view #3, Occupy Bay Area, 2012. 42
Figure 19: Exhibition view #4, Occupy Bay Area, 2012. 42
Figure 20: Exterior view of Oakland Museum of California, 2012. 46
Figure 21: Exterior view of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2012. 53

vii

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the implications, within art museums and in wider social,
political, and economic contexts, of the cultural institutionalization of the recent Occupy
movement. It offers a multi-layered study of two museum exhibitions engendered by the
significant outpour of Occupy actions in the California Bay Area: Portraits from the
Occupation, supported by the Oakland Museum of California, and Occupy Bay Area,
mounted by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The investigation
centers not only on a historical analysis of the exhibitions themselves, but also on a
significant commonality: beyond the obvious similarities rooted in the thematic, these
exhibitions represent the only examples of American museum-funded contemporary art
exhibitions directly engaged with the Occupy movement. The shows are, in this sense, at
the forefront of major shifts in curatorial practices and intended goals. The curatorial
decision to take up Occupy as a thematic subject raises provocative questions about the
densely textured interplay between museums as platforms for discursive and cultural
production, and their role as sites of reflection and sociopolitical activism—including the
problems and possibilities of this role. A close reading of these exhibitions is further
informed by a discussion of their primary and secondary modes of distribution—
museumgoers, occupy activists, and the larger [general] public. Finally, a discussion of
the Occupy movement and the current state of media and politics in the United States
leads to a greater understanding of these exhibitions as cultural platforms for concurrent
reflection to delineate the new conditions of possibility for artists, curators, and cultural
institutions arising from the multifaceted, hyper-networked contemporary social
landscape.
1

Introduction

“[A]rt does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be
recognized, fostered, and supported in everyway possible. But if we are to do this, we will
have to abandon the idealist conception of art. We don't need a cultural renaissance; we
need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle…”
1

—Douglas Crimp, October, 1987

Douglas Crimp wrote the critical essay “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural
Activism,” around the power of art in saving lives amidst the height of the AIDS
epidemic in the late 1980s.
2
Published as the introduction essay in the 43
rd
issue of the
journal October, the text opens with a provocative quote by French philosopher François
Delaporte that states: “I assert, to begin with, that ‘disease’ does not exist. It is therefore
illusory to think that one can ‘develop beliefs’ about it to ‘respond to it. What does exist
is not disease but practices.”
3
Arguing the latter as a critical framework for shattering
normative myths around the AIDS epidemic, Crimp follows with the assertion that,
“AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and
respond to it.”
4
Using an exhibition at the New Museum titled Let the Record Show
(fig.1), Crimp details a cultural practice that he believes successfully supported the larger
social struggle against AIDS.
5
Let the Record Show sought to provoke and heighten
awareness of the AIDS crisis, but also, according to curator William Olander, “it was
among the most significant works of art that had yet been done which was inspired and

1
Douglas Crimp, “Introduction,” October, Vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Winter, 1987): 3-16,
accessed January 15, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397562.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid; Crimp takes the quotes from the opening lines of Francois Delaport’s book Disease and Civilization:The
Cholera in Paris, 1832, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, Massachuessetts, and London, England, MIT Press,
1986), 6.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid, 7.
2

produced within the arms of the crisis.”
6
Crimp suggests that the New Museum was
among the more “hospitable” art institutions to support “socially and politically
committed art practices,” but that activist art practices presented in a museum context can
often raise questions about location and means of distribution.
7
Nevertheless, he argues,
that the purpose of such practices is ultimately to inform and thereby mobilize,
concluding that:
Such information and mobilization can […] save lives; until a cure of AIDS is
developed, only information and mobilization can save lives.
8

Crimp demands that we stop thinking of art only as a commodity and argues for a
dialogue centered on art as a viable solution.
9

While Crimp’s 1987 essay emphasized the power of art with regard to the AIDS
epidemic, his arguments remain, nevertheless, profoundly admissible today—particularly
in relation to contemporary cultural production propagated by the revolutionary wave of
Occupy demonstrations that swept over the United States in 2011. Using Crimp’s
assessment and his rejection of the idealistic conception of art as a springboard for
analysis, this thesis will explore the conditions, motivations, and methodologies of two
museum exhibitions engendered by the significant outpour of Occupy actions in the
California Bay Area: Portraits from the Occupation supported by the Oakland Museum
of California, and Occupy Bay Area, mounted by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in
San Francisco. Crimp’s arguments will prove useful to our understanding of these
exhibitions as pragmatic gestures purposed to inform and as cultural practices actively

6
Ibid.
7
Ibid, 7.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
3

participating in the larger Occupy struggle.
10
Therefore I will begin by following Crimp’s
assertion:
[Occupy] does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it,
and respond to it. We know [Occupy] only in and through those practices. This
assertion does not contest the existence of income inequality, misrepresentation,
suffering, and injustice […] What it does contest is the notion that there is an
underlying reality of [Occupy], upon which are constructed the representations, or
the culture, or the politics of [Occupy]. If we recognize that [Occupy] exists only
in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the
imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.
11

Thus, in order to “wrest control of them” we must first recognize these exhibitions
outside any idealistic notions about art by generating new critical discourse around their
conditions of production and modes of representation; secondly, we must analyze them
through a critical lens in order to accurately understand their efficacy, but also as a means
of properly situating them within a longer trajectory of museum practices and political
activism.
12

In terms of approach and production, lines of distinction between the two
exhibitions fall across geographic and institutional boundaries—particularly in relation to
the sociocultural backgrounds of their publics, the site-specificities relevant to their
physical locations (Oakland vs. San Francisco), and the idiosyncrasies composing the
fabric of their institutional goals and public identity. Aesthetically, differentiation exists
most notably between sociospatial boundaries—that is to say between “real” and virtual
spaces. Necessitated by a virtual platform, Portraits from the Occupation utilized new

10
Ibid.
11
Ibid, 3; I have altered parts of the text from Crimps original essay that stated, “AIDS does not exist apart from the
practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. This
assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes.[…] What it does
contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the
culture, or the politics of AIDS. If we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then
hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.”.
12
Ibid, 3.
4

media technologies to address the politics of representation engendered by national
corporate-sponsored news media, while Occupy Bay Area (placed at the other end of the
spectrum and confined to the physical grounds of the institution) repurposed the
traditional object-based exhibition model as a catalyst for raising new questions
concerning the intersection between art and political processes.
The decision to examine Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area
stems from a surprising —if not significant—commonality: beyond the obvious
similarities rooted in the thematic, these exhibitions are, in fact, the only examples of
American museum-funded contemporary art exhibitions directly engaged with the
Occupy movement.

13
Equally as curious, both exhibitions continue to linger in the blind
spots of contemporary art discourse, thus neither exhibition has yet to be fully explored.
14

This framework represents a missed opportunity to generate new critical discourse about
the changing role of the curator in contemporary art museums, the role of museums in a
revolutionary context, contemporary exhibition tactics, and ultimately, the broader
potential for cultural practices to promote social and political change.
The need for such an exploration comes at a time when major ideologies in
contemporary curatorial thought and museum practices are rapidly shifting.
15
Thus, the
curatorial decision to take up Occupy as a thematic subject raises provocative questions

13
Betti-Sue Hertz, Interview by author, email correspondence, November 30, 2013; Occupy Wall Street commenced
on September 17, 2011.
14
Any discourse related to either Portraits from the Occupation or Occupy Bay Area represent promotional materials
published by local newspaper or magazine outlets and/or press releases. There is one negative review of Occupy Bay
Area published in California College of the Arts Review Blog by Amanda Sebastiani titled “THE ANGER CHILD VS.
INFORMATIVE ADULTS” that criticizes the efficacy of the poster art in Occupy By Area to engender real social
change as they are too angry and lack cleverness. The review, however, is based mostly on formal aesthetics than on
the act of participating in the larger Occupy struggle. I would argue, as Crimp did during the AIDS epidemic, that there
is value in circulating information through aesthetics that work towards finding a solution to the larger sociopolitical
issues; the participation in the struggle and the message of the work carries more efficacy than the formal aesthetics.
15
Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, Vol. No. 1,( New York, NY: Independent Curators International,
2012), 17-19.
5

about the densely textured interplay between museums as platforms for discursive and
cultural production, and their role as sites of reflection and sociopolitical activism—
including the problems and possibilities of this role. One of the goals of this thesis will be
to disentangle the multi-layered implications—within art museums and in the wider
social, political, and economic contexts— of the cultural institutionalization of Occupy.
By utilizing fragments of the Occupy struggle and current conditions of media in
the United States as a backdrop, I will situate Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy
Bay Area within a chronological trajectory of curatorial and exhibition strategies
highlighting the complex relationship between art museums and political praxis. This
contextualization will illustrate how these two exhibitions served as cultural platforms for
concurrent reflection to delineate the new conditions of possibility for artists, curators,
and cultural institutions arising from the multifaceted, hyper-networked contemporary
social landscape. What follows should be read not simply as a historical analysis, but also
as a critical investigation that will attempt to shed light on two exhibitions that have, for
the most part, remained invisible. Perhaps more importantly, however, will be the
questions that arise by juxtaposing the cultural institutionalization of Occupy—a
movement seeking to draw attention to the growing inequalities of wealth— and the
stratified economic structures from which most American museums continue to operate.
Therefore, Chapter 1 will begin by situating these exhibitions within the context of the
Occupy movement and along the historical trajectory of Bay Area activism.
6

Figure 1: Installation view of Let the Record Show, New Museum, 1987.

Photographed by Fred Scrutin
7

Chapter 1: Genealogy of Occupy and Political Activism in the Bay Area

The fervent Occupy momentum witnessed in 2011 has largely dissipated from the
public spaces of our city streets and parks, yet the fundamental questions the movement
raised against hegemonic economic structures and the need for greater political
accountability continue to resonate in the American consciousness—particularly in the
way we speak and think about income inequality and democracy. From the ubiquity of
slogans like “We are the 99%” to terms like “Occupy” and “Wall Street,” the Occupy
movement dramatically altered public sensibility and contemporary political discourse.
16

The discursive shifts wrought by Occupy actions delivered a blow to the hierarchical
political landscape in the United States, even causing members of the wealthiest 1% to
question the viability of an economy built on systemic inequality.
17

With a core strategy
focused in aims to (re) claim the public sphere for the people, Occupy protestors across
the country mobilized against the pervasive socioeconomic disparity, drawing attention to
the lack of government response following the financial crisis of 2008, exposing
corporate corruption engendered by a deregulated, privatized global economy, and
highlighting the general discontent with the rise of extreme right-wing politics in the
United States.
18

16
Dan La Botz, “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the World: The Emergence of a Mass Movement,” New Politics
Vol. XIII No. 4, Whole #52, Winter, 2012, accessed May 5, 2013, http://newpol.org/content/occupy-wall-street-
occupy-world-emergence-mass-movement.
17
Ibid.
18
The national Occupy movement entered the political stage on September 17, 2011 with the occupation of Zuccotti
Park in New York City— a site located halfway between Wall Street and the World Trade Center site. Influenced by
the tactics and success of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, Canadian based anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters initiated
the movement with an open call to #OccupyWallStreet through online blogs and the publication of an enigmatic image
depicting a ballerina delicately posed atop the Wall Street bull. The image went viral and —in conjunction with on-the-
ground organizing by activists such as David Graeber (among other allies)—resulted in the two-month permanent
encampment of Zuccotti Park and attracted thousands to demonstrations in New York City. For a detailed personal
account of the organizing efforts leading up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, refer to David
Graeber’s book, The Democracy Project, 2013.
8

The revolutionary wave of Occupy demonstrations and encampments held in over
600 cities nationwide reached the pinnacle of its collective organizing—both in public
participation and number of actions—in the California Bay Area (fig. 2 & 3).
19
Among
these sites, Occupy Oakland represented the largest encampment followed by Occupy
San Francisco, Occupy Cal, Occupy San Jose, and Occupy the Farm.
20
The coalescing of
multiple Occupy camps and their subsequent political actions within this relatively small
geographic area points to a long regional history entrenched in political activism, racial
tensions, and varied social struggles.
21
One only has to think back to the political activism
and grassroots organizing characterized by The Free Speech Movement (UC Berkeley,
1964), the activities of The Black Panther Party (founded in Oakland in 1966 and
remained active until 1982), The Gay Rights Movement (San Francisco, 1960-1980), The
Alcatraz Native American Occupation (San Francisco, November 20, 1969 - June 11,
1971), and The ARC/AIDS Vigil (50 UN Plaza, San Francisco, October 27, 1987).
22

These political struggles in the Bay Area have played a major role in advancing important
social issues such as free speech and LGBTQ rights, but have also paved the way for
contemporary actions as evidenced by the regions high levels of public engagement
around a multiplicity of other sociopolitical issues—including, but not limited to,
advocating for low-income housing, tenant rights, urban environmentalism, and
neighborhood preservations.
23

19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Bill Balderston, "Occupy Oakland and the Labor Movement." New Politics 14.1 (2012), accessed on June, 5, 2013,
http://newpol.org/content/occupy-oakland-and-labor-movement.
22
Ibid.
23
For more on the Bay Area’s history of progressive activism reference G. William Domhoff, “Power at the Local
Level: Why San Francisco Is (or Used to Be) Different: Progressive Activists and Neighborhoods Had a Big
Impact”,Who Rules America: Power and Politics, accessed on September 5, 2013,
http://whorulesamerica.net/local/san_francisco.html.
9

Figure 2: Occupy Oakland camp covers Oscar Grant Plaza, October 17, 2011, Oakland, CA.

Photographed by Mathew Sumner, SF Gate

Figure 3: Occupy San Francisco camp, Justin Herman Plaza, October 30, 2011, San Francisco, CA.

Photograph courtesy of The Chronicle
10

It would seem then that this historical trajectory operated as a preset to the
political actions ignited by the site-specificities and political conditions relative to
Occupy Oakland. For instance, Occupy activists across the United States were often met
with state-sanctioned police resistance, yet these confrontations played out most violently
between Occupy Oakland demonstrators and the Oakland Police Department (OPD).
24

These tensions [in Oakland] erupted just two weeks after the first tent went up in Frank
H. Ogawa Plaza—(re) named Oscar Grant Plaza by occupiers in honor of the young
African American man shot and killed by police in 2009—and four days after the City of
Oakland issued its first eviction notice.

25
Backed by a state-sanctioned order on October
25, 2011, Oakland police raided and dismantled the Occupy Oakland encampment.
26

Groups of police dressed in riot gear fired tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets into
the camp during the early morning raid.
27
Following the eviction, Occupy Oakland
responded with a peaceful demonstration, but protestors were met once again with heavy-
handed police resistance.

28
The clash rapidly escalated after demonstrator Steve Olsen, a
24-year-old Iraq War veteran, received a serious blow to the head from a projectile fired
by the opposing law enforcement.
29
The chaotic fervor that ensued transformed the City
of Oakland into a temporary urban battlefield eclipsed with clouds of tear gas, broken

24
Judith Butler, “So What Are the Demands? And Where do They Go From Here?,” tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy
Strategy, Issue 2, (March 2012):8-11, accessed November 4, 2013, http://tidalmag.org/pdf/tidal2_spring-is-coming.pdf;
One example of police resistance took place on September 30, 2011 when NYPD arrested 700 hundred peaceful
protestors marching across the Brooklyn Bridge. Other incidents include unarmed, nonviolent protesters on the campus
UC Davis being pepper-sprayed while sitting with linked arms and refusing to move. For more information on police
resistance and the Occupy movement refer to Eric Kain, “Maybe It's Time to Occupy the Police State,” Forbes,
November 11, 2011, accessed February 17, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/11/19/maybe-its-time-to-
occupy-the-police-state/.
25
Jesse McKinley and Malia Wollan, “Outrage Over Veteran Injured at ‘Occupy’ Protest,” The New York Times,
October 27, 2011, accessed on September 5, 2013.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
11

storefronts, and self-identified iconoclasts evading swarms of police.
30
But—and perhaps
more importantly— the momentary chaos, which shutdown the city and incurred close to
$2.4 million in damages to property, exposed the City of Oakland as harboring deeply
problematic divisions along structural and communication lines between the government,
the police force, and its citizens.
31

Nevertheless, the region’s history with collective organizing would prove crucial
once again in the events following the clamorous confrontations. Quick to act, members
from Occupy Oakland joined forces with local labor unions, activists groups, and
grassroots organizations—many of whom had years of activist experience— and on
November 2, 2011 collectively carried-out the country’s first general strike in over 50
years.
32
The now historic day of action witnessed hundreds of thousands of individuals
marching in the streets of Oakland culminating in the successful shut down of the Port of
Oakland, the fifth busiest container port in the United States (fig. 4).
33
This example of
direct action became the largest demonstration associated with the national Occupy
movement.
34
As a result, Occupy Oakland quickly gained international notoriety among
activists as a symbol of resistance and collective organizing.
35

30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Balderston, 2.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Shoshana Walter, “Occupy Oakland and News Media Coexist Uneasily,” The New York Times, November 12, 2011,
accessed November 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us/occupy-oakland-and-news-media-coexist-
uneasily.html; Movements across the globe would demonstrate in solidarity with Occupy Oakland.
12

Subsequently, however, the political urgency encapsulated by Occupy Oakland
also gave birth to a number of social phantasms about Black Panther organizing, activist
violence, leftist politics, and counterculture revolutions rendering the separation between
the imaginary and the real, the mythical and the phenomenological difficult to decipher.
Government and media portrayals of Occupy Oakland characterized the regional
movement as an isolated anarchist disruption with little political import, and the
occupation of public space(s) a result of reflexive libertarianism predicated on violence
and the destruction of public property.
36
This viewpoint, however, obscured Occupy
Oakland’s relationship to the structural conditions of daily existence in the region, the

36
Ibid.
Figure 4: Thousands of Occupy demonstrators march from downtown Oakland to the port of Oakland on
Wednesday, November 2, 2011.

Photographed by Paul Sakuma
13

erosion of social relations under the existing neoliberal idea of community, and the
profound symbols of both racial and gender solidarity unseen in the United States since
the decline of the leftist upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s.
37

What emerges here is a problematic blurring of the historical present and a
nostalgic imaginary resulting in a generalized packaging and reifying of localized public
identity.
38
Occupy Oakland becomes reduced to merely an extension of past social
movements within the framework of capitalism’s commodification of the individual. This
conflation points to a tacit hierarchy between political subjects and their agency in
political praxis, but also significantly downplays the specific affective intensity of social
and cultural exchange, dialogue, and activity triggered by the plurality of voices
composing the local movement’s social and political identity.
39
In reality, Occupy
Oakland is a complex, powerful story of spatial regional politics, social resilience,
interdisciplinary collaborations, and the embodiment of the democratic idea of “the
people” regularly effaced by existing power structures.
40

All of this is not to gloss over the real violent confrontations witnessed between
demonstrators and the Oakland police, nor is it intended to excuse the destruction of
public or private property, but rather to draw attention to a larger systemic issue
embedded in the biases promoted by corporate-sponsored media constructions, the

37
Balderston.
38
In linguistics and rhetoric the “historical present” refers to the use of the present tense when discussing past events.
According to literary critics, the historical present has the effect of making historical or past events seem more vivid.
Thus by using the historical present to describe the organizing tactics employed by the Black Panther movement, or
past examples of protest violence such as the White Night Riots that took place in San Francisco on May 21, 1979
following the lenient sentencing of Dan White in the death of Harvey Milk, or the riots in Oakland following the
murder of Oscar Grant in 2009 in relation to the actions carried out by Occupy Oakland results in an inappropriate
conflation between these historical events and present actions. For more on theories related to the historical present
refer to Nessa Wolfson, “The Conversational Historical Present Alternation,” Language, 55 (1), (Linguistic Society of
America, 1979), 168-82.
39
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (London ;New York: Verso
Books, 2012), 21.
40
Judith Butler, “So What Are the Demands? And Where do They Go From Here?,” tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy
Strategy, Issue 2, (March 2012):8-11, accessed November 4, 2013, http://tidalmag.org/pdf/tidal2_spring-is-coming.pdf.
14

hierarchical politics of representation so firmly entrenched in American mainstream
media culture, and subsequently, the challenges faced by social movements and cultural
producers (i.e. artists, curators, museums) attempting to dismantle the status quo.

1.1 Occupy and the Politics of Representation
Considering the limited temporal and critical distance between the Occupy events
outlined above and the 2012 opening dates for both Portraits from the Occupation and
Occupy Bay Area, it will prove useful for this investigation to consider the state of media
in the United States and its relationship to the construction of Occupy Oakland within
mainstream culture. It is important to recognize the extent to which these representations
circulated during the height of Occupy actions and the months leading up to the mounting
of these exhibitions (fig. 5 & 6).
15

Figure 5: Screen shot of the opening and public screening announcement for Portraits from the
Occupation at the Oakland Museum of California, May 1, 2012.

Figure 6: Poster for the opening night reception of
Occupy Bay Area at the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, San Francisco, July 7, 2012.

Poster by Rich Black

16

Since the beginning, the Occupy movement received repeated criticism from
skeptics for not presenting a concrete set of demands.
41
The skepticism only increased
following the confrontations in Oakland when critics began questioning the political
efficacy of Occupy Oakland, particularly since their main public site of occupation had
been cleared out by state-ordered police power.
42
To take this point of view, however, is
to insist that in order for sociopolitical movements to qualify as “political” they must be
organized around a concrete list of demands—and that those demands must be presented
and clearly articulated to the authorities (a company, corporation, or the state) of the
existing economic and political structures.
43
Yet to define intelligible politics as the
production of a list of concrete demands presupposes a commitment to the legitimacy of
the very regimes of power propagating the systemic structures of inequality.
44

Considering the larger implications, however, the misrepresentation of Occupy as
“apolitical” by critics and skeptics alike is perhaps not all that surprising. In an article
written for the online magazine tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy titled “So What
Are the Demands? And Where Do they Go From Here?” Judith Butler writes:
One of the key ways that existing regimes of power maintain their legitimacy is
by debunking and dismissing all forms of popular political resistance that call
their own legitimacy into question. They have strong self-interested reasons to
dismiss the Occupy movement as “apolitical.” At that moment, they are trying to
maintain a monopoly on the discourse of the political, trying, in other words, to
define and control the power of discourse that will establish who makes senses,

41
Butler, 10.
42
Ibid, 8.
43
Ibid; In her essay “So What Are the Demands? And Where Do they Go From Here?” Judith Butler argues against the
notion that in order for a political movement to qualify as “political” it must be organized around a set of demands. She
writes, “1. Demands should take the form of a list. Let us imagine that the Occupy Movement were to say that we have
three demands: (a) the end of home foreclosures, (b) forgiving student debt, and (c) a decrease in unemployment. In
some ways, each of these demands surely resonates with what Occupy is about, and people who are concerned with all
these issues have clearly joined occupy, joined demonstrations with signs that oppose home foreclosures,
unmanageable student debt, and unemployment rates. So the list of demands is clearly related to the Occupy
Movement, and yet, it would be a mistake to say that the political meaning or effect of the Occupy Movement can be
understood perfectly well by understanding these demands or, indeed, a much longer list of demands. The first reason
is that a “list” is a series of demands. But a list does not explain how these demands are related to one another.”.
44
Ibid, 10.
17

whose actions are truly political, and who is “beyond the pale,” “misguided,” and
“impractical.”
45

Contextualized by the ubiquity of new media technologies in the twenty-first century, the
attempts to depoliticize and vilify Occupy Oakland can be seen most vividly in aesthetic
representations promoted by mainstream corporate-sponsored media firms.

46
Digital
images of violence, police in riot gear, and large demonstrations shutting down the City
of Oakland compose the ontological categories through which the spectacle of Occupy
Oakland is presented.
47
Unlike the Occupy actions in New York and other cities across
the country, the Occupy Oakland revolution was, in fact, highly televised.
48

There is, however, concrete reasoning behind this phenomenon. Propagated by a
media model co-opted by corporate conglomerates and government partners, the biases
evident in corporate-sponsored news reporting—including those applied to Occupy
Oakland— tend to favor the attitudes, beliefs, and agendas of those in power; the
wealthiest 1% and large advertising firms who have gained special access (to news) by
providing substantial subsidies to dominant media-conglomerates, consequently
rendering the latter dependent on the political ideologies and economic incentives of their
funders.
49

The existing regime of media power can be traced back to 1996 when President
Bill Clinton signed The Telecommunications Act opening the floodgates for cross-media

45
Ibid.
46
Emily Brissette, “On ‘Violence’ at Occupy Oakland For the Fracture of Good Order,” CounterPunch, Weekend
Edition November 4-6, 2011, accessed on October 30, 2013, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/04/for-the-fracture-
of-good-order/.
47
Ibid.
48
Walter.
49
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman write “In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and
fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts,
also, play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. For more, see, Noam Chomsky and Edward
S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
18

ownership.
50
The number of localized media outlets has since exhaustively diminished
leaving only five major media conglomerates—Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation,
Viacom, and Bertelsmann—in ownership over most mainstream newspapers, magazines,
radio, and television stations in the United States.
51
These types of for-profit business
models engendered by the current economic and political structures embody the
problematic forms of deregulation under the contemporary capitalist system that many
Occupy activists have rallied against since the beginning.
52

The implications of these media structures wielding unprecedented levels of
strength, power, and influence on the agency of Occupy Oakland, has resulted in a
homogeneity of perspectives—at least within the mainstream understanding of politics.
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman note in their seminal analysis of the propaganda
model, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media:
A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a great deal of
active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave
odds.
53

Through their omnipotence, these media conglomerates attempted to distract public
attention away from the disastrous consequences of a dominant system grounded in
deregulated, trickle-down-economics by not only dismissing Occupy Oakland as
“apolitical,” but also—and perhaps most powerfully— by flooding their networks with
representations of violence, conflict, and chaos in order to sway public opinion against
Occupy—a national movement which fundamentally called their [corporate media
conglomerates] legitimacy into question.

54

50
Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 3.
51
Ibid.
52
Bill Balderston. "Occupy Oakland and the Labor Movement." New Politics 14.1 (2012), accessed on June, 5, 2013.
53
Chomsky and Herman.
54
Shoshana Walter, “Occupy Oakland and News Media Coexist Uneasily,” The New York Times, November 12, 2011.
19

1.2 Independent Media, Self-Representation, & Localized Artistic Production
The corporate media hegemony is particularly pressing within the politics of
representation and the construction of public identity in the United States, but this is not
to say that alternative media sources reporting on Occupy Oakland and the larger Occupy
movement were/are nonexistent. Take, for the example, the extensive coverage on
Occupy by the independent news organization Democracy Now!
55
Furthermore, the issue
around Occupy refusing to clearly label its demands seems to have evolved partly in
response to the generalized production of images that define contemporary political
subjects.
56
As a result, many Occupy activists turned to self-reporting tactics (cell phone
recording, Twitter journalism, blogging, personal photographs, etc.) as both a form of
protection and as a reprisal to the phantasms surrounding movement.
57
Additionally, we
see an explosion of self-representations— both at the encampments in the form of DYI
slogan signs and on the Internet through social networking sites like Facebook,
Instagram, and numerous Occupy blogs (fig. 7 & 8).
58

55
Democracy Now!: A DAILY INDEPENDENT GLOBAL NEWS HOUR with Amy Goodman & Juan González,
“About Us,” accessed February 8, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/about.
56
Butler, 10.
57
Ibid.
58
Each Occupy location had their own website where they could share relevant information about their actions and
issues effecting their particular site. Several of these sites include www.occupywallst.org, www.occupyoakland.org,
and www.wearethe99%.tumblr.com, accessed Febrauary 10, 2014.
20

Figure 7: A story-telling booth in Oscar Grant Plaza organized by Occupy Oakland at which
participants were invited to share their ‘99% Story, 2011.

Photograph courtesy of New American Paintings Blog
Figure 8: Karen Stewart paints a protest sign before a rally by Occupy Oakland demonstrators October
22, 2011.

Photograph courtesy of SF Gate
21

Before discussing the specificities of both Portraits from the Occupation and
Occupy Bay Area, it should be noted that these exhibitions are by no means the only
examples of cultural practices associated to the Occupy Movement, nor do they attempt
to represent the multiplicity of perspectives constituting the diverse community of artists
and production of art taking place in the Bay Area and across the United States on the
ground, at the camps, and around other Occupy sites of public convergence. One example
outside the Bay Area, for instance, is the Arts & Labor group, which formed in
conjunction with the New York General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street.
59
The
formation of Arts & Labor corresponds to what art critic Martha Schwendener points out
in her article “Arts & Labor in the Age of Occupation” published in Afterimage 39, no. 5:
Occupy […] dovetailed in many ways with current strains of art, like social
practice, in which artists function more as event planners, organizers, sociologists,
and activists, and participation that involves art made or completed by groups
rather than singular, individual “geniuses.” There is also an overlap with the
1960s, which brought performance, video, installation, Land Art, earthworks, and
the interdisciplinary mergers of media like dance, film, theater, and writing. It was
also an age of radical politics, and although the failures of many projects were
already obvious in the ’60s, some of these weren’t apparent until the ’70s, when
Institutional Critique – which would become a recognized institutional form in the
’80s – entered the art world.
60

Furthermore, this form of site-specific, socially engaged art also flourished in the
encampments of Occupy Oakland, Occupy San Francisco, and Occupy Cal, and can be
understood as yet another form of self-representation and public address associated with

59
Martha. Schwendener, "Arts & Labor in the Age of Occupation," Afterimage 39, no. 5 (2012), 4; Consisting of a
range of art workers including artists, writers, educators, designers, curators, students, art handlers, administrators, and
interns the Arts & Labor drew on strategies used by artists groups formed to address labor concerns from the 1960s to
the 1980s such as the Art Workers Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group, and slightly later groups like the Guerrilla
Girls, ACT UP, Group Material, Gran Fury, and Women’s Action Coalition. Their group statement read as follows:
Arts & Labor is dedicated to exposing and rectifying economic inequalities and exploitative working conditions in our
fields through direct action and educational initiatives. By forging coalitions, fighting for fair labor practices, and
reimagining the structures and institutions that frame our work, Arts & Labor aims to achieve parity for every member
of the ninety-nine percent.
60
Martha. Schwendener, "Arts & Labor in the Age of Occupation," Afterimage 39, no. 5 (2012), 4.
22

Occupy.
61
Harking back to the region’s historical relationship to the art of political and
concert poster production, a flurry of local artists set up pop-up studios on the grounds of
the Bay Area encampments and began printing and circulating political posters free of
charge.
62
Many of these posters were disseminated during the November 2
nd
day of action
and other public Occupy actions in the Bay Area.
63

While resonating with similar associations to historical practices linking cultural
production to radical politics and activism, Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy
Bay Area differed at their core, however, as collaborative cultural practices directly—and
inextricably— tied to the museums that nurtured them. Moreover, the multiplicity of
participants—artists, journalists, curators, program managers, and designers—involved in
the production of these two exhibitions were inherently subject to a complicated set of
pre-existing social and spatial relationships framed not only by the Bay Area’s long
history of racial, economic, and sociopolitical tensions, but also by conditions in
contemporary museum politics and shifting practices engendered by the digital image
phenomenon.

61
Caitlin Donohue, “To be a poster artist during Occupy: Chuck Sperry on psychedelic art, social change, and port
shutdowns,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, July 20, 2012, accessed January 30, 2014,
http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision/2012/07/20/be-poster-artist-during-occupy-chuck-sperry-psychedelic-art-social-
change-an.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
23

Chapter 2: (Re)Framing Politics/Occupy Re(Framed)

2.1 Motivations for an Alternative Public Space

Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area therefore emerged as two
contemporary art exhibitions born into a world of Occupy related images—far more
pervasive than the New Museum exhibition Crimp refers to and within a set of contextual
conditions extending from private to public, physical to virtual spaces.
64
As Taeul Harper
writes in his book Democracy in the Age of New Media: The Politics of the Spectacle,
“the public sphere of today is dominated by spectacles.”
65
Coupled with the capabilities
of mass circulation propagated by Web 2.0, the spectacles in contemporary society with
the highest levels of saturation in turn hold the greatest power in shaping facets of the
social consciousness—or conversely, in constructing normative subjectifications.
66
For
instance, in the recent book by David Joselt, After Art, for instance, he states:
The scale at which images proliferate and the speed with which they travel have
never been greater […] images produce power—a current or currency—that is
activated by contact with spectators. The more points of contact an image is able
to establish, the greater its power will be.
67

As such, the digital image phenomenon of the last decade has fundamentally altered the
way images are consumed and culturally perceived, which has subsequently leveraged
the power inherent in mainstream media representations.
68
Capable of streaming into the
most private of spaces through now normative technologies such as personal computer
screens, televisions, and mobile phones, these electronic images are among the most

64
Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl, “Introduction: Imagery in the 21
st
Century,” Imagery in the 21
st
Century, (Boston:
MIT, 2011), 1.
65
Tauel Harper, Democracy in the Age of New Media: The Politics of the Spectacle, (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
66
David Joselit, After Art, 85-96.
67
Ibid.
68
Grau, Oliver and Thomas Veigl, Imagery in the 21st Century, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 1.
24

culturally influential and hold the greatest potential for circulation.
69
This phenomenon
would explain the ubiquity of the Occupy Oakland spectacle constructed by mainstream
media images despite heightened levels of social connectivity and alternative forms of
self-representation.
The result, however, presents a paradox: a society saturated by spectacles vying
desperately for the public’s (i.e. the consumer’s) attention results not in the
decentralization of knowledge, but rather in a growing attention to individual and private
concerns.
70
In the ‘Age of the Spectacle,’ shortsightedness outweighs critical depth,
subjectivity dominates objectivity, and media production favors sensation-provoking
entertainment over a practice committed to democratic modes of representation.
71

Considering the distinguishing characteristics of today’s social landscape, which are not
exactly comparable to resonant historical social movements, activist art, and modes of
image circulation, what were the strategies, site-specific circumstances, and issues of
representation faced by Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area—
particularly as exhibitions engendered within a museum framework? Did the institutions
themselves frame the conditions for a larger sociopolitical critique or did the Occupy
thematic embody strategies for new curatorial possibilities amidst the ‘Age of the
Spectacle’?
72
In this context, Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area will
seem prescient: as two exhibitions that exist as quick institutional responses to the
activities of Occupy in the Bay Area (or in other words as institutional ‘reflections-in-
action’), and as cultural practices that operated as alternative information platforms in

69
Martin Schulz, “The Unmasking of Images,” Imagery in the 21st Century, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 40.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.
25

direct opposition to normative representations of “the other”— with Occupy, in this case,
embodying “the other.”
73
To vindicate these claims, the investigation will now turn to the
conditions of the exhibitions themselves and for the sake of clarity will be discussed in
chronological order.

2.2 Portraits from the Occupation: A Virtual Performance in Multiplicity

Several months after the tumultuous Occupy activity that transpired in Oakland,
the journalist Alex Abramovich and the artist Lucy Raven attended an exhibition at The
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) documenting the historic solidarity movement
of 1968 appropriately titled The 1968 Exhibit.
74
Two months later, the two would mount
the digital media exhibition Portraits from the Occupation on The Oakland Standard
website—a two year experimental project curated by OMCA.
75
Modeled on the
documentary, nuanced interview format of The Black Power Mixtapes 1967-1975—a
comprehensive look at the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s made by
Swedish journalists—Portraits from the Occupation initially evolved out of a
disappointment Abramovich and Raven felt towards the limited perspectives represented
in The 1968 Exhibit.
76
Abramovich explains, “We thought, ‘What would we have done if
we had a time machine and could go back to 1968 with a camera and a notebook? What
did we wish someone had done?’”
77
Building off these sentiments and faced with the
contemporary acts of profound solidarity evidenced by Occupy Oakland, Abramovich

73
Philosopher Donald Alan Schon was an influential thinker in developing the theory and practice of reflective
professional learning in the twentieth century. He theorized the importance in “reflection-in-action” as a precursor to
substantive change in the professional world. For more on his theory refer to The Reflective Practitioner: How
Professionals Think in Action. (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
74
Abramovich and Raven, August 13, 2013.
75
“Portraits from the Occupation,” The Oakland Standard, accessed April 4, 2013.
76
Abramovich and Raven, August 13, 2013.
77
Ibid.
26

and Raven conceived of Portraits from the Occupation as an alternative information
platform—outside the unbalanced representations dominating mainstream news media—
for the historical preservation and documentation of a multiplicity of Occupy
perspectives.
78
In the final exhibition, Abramovich and Raven take us on a citywide
investigation surveying the missing viewpoints and personalities of different individuals
affected by the Occupy movement, which had, for the most part, been entirely ignored by
the local news media (fig. 9 & 10).
79

The exhibition took four weeks to be realized; in order to launch the project on
May 1, 2012—also known as “May Day” a date historically rooted in the international
labour movement and now a major day of action for Occupy—Abramovich and Raven
worked around the clock procuring subjects, conducting interviews, and filming on
location without any additional support from OMCA.
80
Working closely with a network
of Oakland residents—including activists, journalists, elected officials, organizers,
business owners, city employees, and others—and using a small digital video camera and
a portable audio recording device, Portraits from the Occupation emerges as an intimate
collection of ‘time capsules’, a digital mosaic of sixteen first-person narratives capturing
a cross-section of Oakland’s population.

Highlighting the complexity of Occupy Oakland
and operating as a digital archive providing a balanced view of this historic moment,
Portraits from an Occupation sought to build a visual case against the failures of the
mainstream media.
81
“In a way,” Raven explains, “they are the people who are often
forgotten.”
82

78
Ibid.
79
Ibid.

80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
27

Figure 9: Screen shot of Portraits from the Occupation on The Oakland Standard website. Participants
pictured from left to right: Susie Cagle, Leo Ritz-Barr, Philip Tagami, and Joshua Clover.
Figure 10: Screen shot of Portraits from the Occupation on The Oakland Standard website.
Participants pictured from top left to bottom right: Jean Quan, Christopher Moreland, Desley
Brooks, Max Allstadt, Jesse Palmer, Leila Seraphin, Arturo Sanchez, Alanna Rayford, Corine
Gaston, Scott Olsen, Ricardo Robles Gil, Anthony Batts.
28

Within the larger context of politics, Portraits from the Occupation and Raven’s
statement point to the paradoxical nature of the prevailing concept of representation
under the existing political structure in the United States. Predicated on a representative
democracy, the latter has been criticized for failing to take into account the injustices
experienced by historically marginalized groups, in particular minorities and women
(Williams, 1998; Urbinati, 2000, 2002; Young 2002).
83
According to political sociologist
Leonardo Avritzer, debates in recent democratic theory have passed through two major
developments.
84
The first being deliberative democracy, which critiques the aggregative
view of democracy and proposes a model for improving the quality of the democratic
process through forms of public reasoning and argumentation.
85
The second development
is related to a theory of representation that suggests a renewal of existing concepts of
representation is needed in order to “reconstruct the quality of democracy.”
86
Political
theorist Nadia Urbinati has argued that representation should not be based on the
aggregation of interests, but rather on the preservation of disagreements necessary for
preserving liberty.
87
In other words, Urbinati poses an agonistic conception of
democracy, one that emphasizes the value of the domain of opinion, the expressive, and
disagreements to the practice and ethos of democracy.
88

In Portraits from the Occupation, then, the disaggregation of perspectives
encourages the viewer to acknowledge the diversity of those represented. All of the

83
Melissa Williams, “The Uneasy Alliance of Group Representation and Deliberative Democracy”, in Citizenship in
Diverse Societies, W. Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (eds.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 124–153
84
For more on recent debates in democratic theory refer to Leonardo Avritzer,"Democracy beyond aggregation: the
participatory dimension of public deliberation," Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 8: Iss. 2, Article 10, (2012),
accessed February 15, 2014, http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol8/iss2/art10.
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid.
87
Nadia Urbinati and Warren, M., The concept of representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory. Annual Review
of Political Science, Vol 11, 2008), 387-412.
88
Ibid.
29

interviews are recorded and presented as autonomous performances (the spatial layout
will be discussed later in the text). As a starting point, Abramavich and Raven procured
six interview subjects—Susie Cagle, independent journalist; Leo Ritz-Barr,
organizer/Occupy Oakland Events Committee; Philip Tagami, Bay area real estate
developer; Joshua Clover, UC Davis English professor and militant; Jean Quan, Mayor of
Oakland; and Christopher Moreland, Occupy Oakland Tactical Action Committee —but
quickly realized that six interviews would not present “a clear enough picture”
Abramovich explains.
89
Therefore the list of interview subjects quickly increased to
twelve, expanding ultimately to sixteen.
90
Presented in the order in which they were
recorded the additional ten interview subjects include—Desley Brooks, City Council
Member, District 6; Max Allstadt, carpenter/activist; Jesse Palmer, attorney/activist; Leila
Seraphin, kitchen coordinator Occupy Oakland; Arturo Sanchez, Deputy City
Administrator, City of Oakland; Alanna Rayford, business owner, Downtown Oakland;
Katie Mitchell, retired postal worker/North Oakland homeowner, with her sister, Corine
Gaston; Scott Olsen, Veterans for Peace; Ricardo Robles Gil, truck owner/operator at the
Port of Oakland; Anthony Batts, Chief, Oakland Police Department (retired).
91
The
number and choice of participants was primarily determined by two factors: the consent
of the interviewee and time constraints. First, while hoping to obtain interviews from
current representatives of the Oakland Police Department, the police union, truck
operators in support of Occupy, and editors of Adbusters magazines (among others), open
invitations from Abramovich and Raven were either ignored or denied.
92
Secondly, the

89
Abramovich and Raven, August 13, 2013.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid.
30

short four-week timeframe leading up to the exhibition’s May 1
st
opening date limited the
possibility of conducting more than sixteen interviews; time simply ran out.
93

In an effort to remain as objective as possible while also providing each
participant an equal opportunity to speak freely about their own experiences, Abramovich
and Raven approached Occupy’s political themes in a non-threatening, semi-structured
way that resulted in the collection of nuanced data inaccessible via traditional news
media interviews.
94
What surfaces in Portraits from the Occupation are the stark
misunderstandings between Occupy activists and Oakland city officials—particularly in
the ideological stalemates they describe. The interview structure also resulted in an
informal collaboration between the producers and the individuals interviewed, that while
guided by a set of four previously constructed questions, reflects a plurality of local
perceptions around Occupy Oakland and highlights the genuine concerns ordinary
citizens have about their city’s ability to resolve the political, social, and economic issues
embedded in the larger Occupy struggle.
95
In this way, rather than establishing
representative viewpoints, Portraits from the Occupation embodies the notion of direct
democracy, where each individual has agency within this framework to speak on behalf
of themselves and not as representatives for Occupy Oakland nor the City of Oakland.

93
Ibid.
94
Ibid.
95
“Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 4, 2013; Abramovich and Raven asked each participant a set of four
questions and always in the same order. The questions are represented in the order they were asked: “1 )How did you
become involved with Occupy Oakland?; 2) How has Occupy Oakland been good and/or bad for the Oakland?; 3)
Given the benefit of hindsight, what are some of the things that Occupy Oakland and/or the City of Oakland could or
should have done differently? 4) What’s next (or, what do you hope is next) for Occupy Oakland and the City of
Oakland?” http://museumca.org/theoaklandstandard/portraits-occupation.
31

2.3 Occupy Bay Area: Object(s) Performing Activism

If Portraits from the Occupation sought to represent an aggregation of viewpoints
around Occupy through the exhibition of filmed speech acts, then Occupy Bay Area
attempted to establish an agonistic platform through an aggregation of objects related to
Occupy and Bay Area activism. Mounted from July 7, 2012 to Oct 14, 2012, Occupy Bay
Area featured a multi-media, inter-disciplinary collection of works—including painting,
film, printmaking, installation, collage, photography, radio broadcasts, and
documentary—seeking to establish a space for dialogue and reflection triggered by the
objects on view (fig. 11).
96
Curator Betti-Sue Hertz notes that she was especially taken
with the aesthetic strength of the Bay Area Occupy posters, and equally impressed with
how these materials were utilized and circulated in practice as tools for transmitting
messages of protest and concern on a range of important social issues.
97
Intended less as
an activist tool, Occupy Bay Area operated as a mode of representation that would allow
viewers to engage with the Occupy material as a catalyst for thinking through important
issues around government and its failures, and also the role of protest as a starting point
for putting forward progressive ideas for social justice and change.
98
The aim was never
intended to represent a complete social history of the Occupy movement, but rather to
align YBCA—as an institution—with the cultural practices participating in the
progressive politics and underlying perspectives of Occupy.
99
Hertz writes:
[Occupy Bay Area] is presented as an exhibition where the images created by
local artists, activists, and visual journalists shows that the power of imagery
carries forward an evocative and emotional expression of the very popular and
widespread sentiments and efforts of the Occupy Movement. By localizing our

96
Betti-Sue Hertz, Interview by author, email correspondence, November 30, 2013.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid.
32

efforts we also pay special tribute to the role that Bay Area artists have played in
giving voice to the 99% and utilizing art as an effective vehicle for social
change.
100

Following this line of thought, the exhibition featured an amalgamation of forty artists
whose work addressed, supported, or aligned with the discourse central to the Occupy
movement.
101

100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
Figure 11: Exhibition view #1 of Occupy Bay Area, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2012

Photograph courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
33

Figure 12:‘Hella Occupy
Oakland’ posters printed and
distributed by Jon-Paul Bail of
Political Gridlock, a
street art collective in Oakland.

Photograph courtesy of
New American Paintings

The exhibition showcased over twenty political posters made for circulation
during the height of Occupy’s political momentum—several produced directly on the
grounds of the urban encampments (fig. 12).
102
These posters, mirroring the multiplicity
of concerns associated with Occupy, represent a wide range of aesthetic designs and
address a diversity of social and political issues: from artist Rich Black’s signature style
of minimal text against a backdrop of bold colors in his General Strike poster (fig. 13), to
artist Favianna Rodriquez’s The World vs. The 1% (fig. 14), which urges people to
examine not only the immediate economic crisis, but also the larger economic structure
as a whole with the simple slogan “CAPITALISM IS THE CRISIS.”
103
Another poster
by Rodriquez seeks to incorporate feminist issues within the larger socioeconomic and
political discussion through the representation of a single woman positioned in the central
foreground of the composition, carrying a flag with the words “OCCUPY

102
Ibid.
103
The Yerba Buena Center for the Art, Occupy Bay Area, accessed June 3, 2013; Occupy Bay Area Object List, Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts Archive, provided by Betti-Sue Hertz, accessed July 18, 2013.
34

Figure 13: Rich Black,
Oakland General Strike,
Offset Print, 17 x 11 inches,
2011.

Figure 14: Favianna Rodriquez,
The World vs. The 1%,
Screen Print, 24 x 18 inches,
2012.

Figure 15: Favianna
Rodriquez, Occupy
Sisterhood Screen Print, 17 x
11 inches, 2012.

SISTERHOOD” (fig. 15).
104
Using a vibrant pink background, the woman dressed in
various shades of green marches fiercely towards the object of her gaze—somewhere
beyond the picture plane— and reminds the viewer that women’s issues are human issues
with the words, “THE WAR ON WOMEN IS A WAR ON EVERYONE.”
105
Other
posters include The Birth of the Occupy Movement and The Homeless Occupy Movement
by Ronnie Goodman, a homeless artist within the Occupy movement; American Gothic
by Xavier Viramontes which seeks to address the concept of the ‘American Dream’
against the fragility of societal safety nets; Jon-Paul Bail’s Hella Occupy series which
include Hella Occupy Oakland and Hella Occupy Cal created and distributed at each site;
Chuck Sperry’s This Is Our City, We Can Shut It Down in his brightly colored “60s rock
poster” style; a series by Melanie Cervantes including We are the 99%-The Richest 1% &
Corporations Should Pay Their Fair Share and We are the 99%-Unite for Justice-Not
Divided by Racism among others; and Colin Smith’s Occupy Everything poster

104
Ibid.
105
Ibid.
35

visualizing the disparity between the 99% and the 1% using a simple info-graphic pie
chart.
106

Furthermore, as a means of establishing an historical context and a connection to
previous political struggles in the region, Hertz included political posters and
photographs by 17 artists (8 known, 9 unknown) engendered by earlier social movements
such as The Blank Panthers, ARC/AIDS Vigil at San Francisco’s City Hall, The Free
Speech Movements, and others.
107
“By including these works,” Hertz explains, “we are
not meaning to say that all of these efforts are the same, as they aren’t, although they all
come out of a deep desire for marginalized peoples to be represented fairly and treated
fairly.”
108
Several examples include two political posters by Emory Douglas Afro-
American solidarity with the oppressed People of the world (1969) and You can jail a
revolutionary but you can't jail the revolution (1970); Rubert Garcia’s Down with
Whiteness (1969); Alcatraz—Indian Land (1970) by “Indian Joe” Morris; Rachel
Romero/ San Francisco Poster Brigade’s International Hotel Struggle—10 Proud, Defiant
Years!(1979); Ilka Hartman’s prints We will not Give Up! (June 11, 1971) and The
Proclamation (May 30, 1970); and photographs by Steven Marcus of the Free Speech
Movement in 1964 (fig. 16).
109

106
Ibid, These are only a sample of the posters included in Occupy Bay Area. Following the exhibition, all of the
posters were donated to the Oakland Museum of California. For a full listing of posters included refer to OMCA’s
online archive, which is accessible and free to the public.
107
Ibid
108
Ibid
109
Occupy Bay Area Object List
36

Figure 16: Marchers
coming through Sather
Gate with a Free
Speech sign to the UC
Regents’ meeting in
University Hall to
present their position on
the Free Speech
controversy, November
20, 1964, Berkeley.

Photographed by
Steven Marcus

Acknowledging the heterogeneous characteristic of Occupy, the multiplicity of
works in Occupy Bay Area converge between five points of contact, all of which are
distinctive traits of the movement: aesthetic lineage, encampment as protest in the Bay
Area, self-organizing social structures, demands/no demands, and the general
assembly.
110
Guided by these points of synthesis, Hertz believed it necessary to also
present a series of documentary photography and video within the exhibition context.
111

This inclusion of photojournalism would seem to participate in dialogue with the images
documenting earlier social movements, thus aesthetically highlighting several key
historical precedents for activism in the Bay Area that include strategies such as
encampments, sit-ins, and long term vigils where the physical occupation of space served
as a crucial element of protest.
112

110
Occupy Bay Area Exhibition Description, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Archive, provided by Betti-Sue Hertz,
accessed July 18, 2013.
111
Hertz, 2013.
112
Occupy Bay Area Exhibition Description.
37

Parallel to this and as a means for expanding the critical discourse, the exhibition
presented five contemporary artists whose work resonated with the themes, desires, and
strategies of the movement, but which also provided a range of perspectives related to
larger globalized issues.
113
These include colored panels by Meghan Wilson stating “We
are the 99%” in many different languages; an experimental video by Sergio de la Torre
created in Tijuana with a group of Chinese-Mexicans who occupy a housing project;
Kota Ezawa’s images from the protests on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall from
1960 and images from frames of the famous Odessa Steps massacre scene from Serge
Eisenstein’s film, The Battle of Potemkin (1925); various illustrations by Eric Drooker;
and documentary videos from the late 1990s that Suzanne Lacy created with youth in
Oakland.
114
The task of calling attention to the plurality of voices and concerns emerging
from the Occupy struggle were enacted literally in relation to the multiplicity of objects
represented—exposing the tensions between perspectives by exhibiting both news media
and contemporary art representations; insisting on a dissensus of visual continuity, but
pushing a theoretical consensus on awareness, criticality, and concern for the existing
hegemony of neoliberalism and financial capitalism; and negating normative art world
hierarchies by having both American and international artists at varying levels in their
careers—particularly the inclusion of students such as Chinese-born artist Li Chen and
her film Aphasia.
115
According to Hertz:
While many of the artists in the exhibition are originally from the U.S. it was
important to find voices of those who had immigrated to the U.S. Some of those
people are very vulnerable if they do not have U.S. citizenship yet, so it was
harder to find international perspectives within Occupy. We did find some great
photos and Li Chen's film added another dimension. It is more of a personal diary

113
Ibid.
114
Ibid.
115
Ibid.
38

and was a great counterpoint to the documentary nature of much of the lens-based
work. It was also working from the perspective of expectations and failure that
reflects back to China, so while personal it allowed for a point of view that would
not have been represented otherwise, where Occupy's critiques of U.S. policy
becomes a stand in loosely for critiques of the Chinese government.
116

Arguably, by including Chen’s film Aphasia in the exhibition, Hertz creates continuity
between the varying political narratives represented—not in regards to aesthetics, but
rather theoretically and through an overarching critique. For instance, according to the
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, “Aphasia is a disorder that results
from damage to the parts of the brain that contain language. Aphasia causes problems
with any or all of the following: speaking, listening, reading, and writing.”
117
As such, the
multi-media film Aphasia—which blends still photographs, dialogues, and sound effects
taken during various Occupy Oakland actions—is a story not about the physical inability
to speak, but more importantly a story about the curtailing of freedom of individual
expression within certain social and political conditions.
118
In an interview about the
work Chen states:
We can take out one single photo inside the piece, and it can represent another
time and location. In these photos, we can see young couples falling asleep in the
midnight inside a tent on a square they occupied; we can see a young man thrown
down by the police; we can see woman crying with sadness. We can say this is
the Occupy Movement in America in 2011; we can also say this is Berkeley in the
70s; we can even say this is China, Middle East, Rio, or even Istanbul in 2013.
History is repeating itself everyday […] My father believes in our government
and our party. Every child growing up there [China] knows that you shouldn’t talk
bad things about the government in public. I do the same, because I don’t want to
get in trouble and most importantly I don’t want to hurt my father. So even today
when I am making a piece about some political issue, I don’t say it directly. I use
metaphor. So I am suffering from aphasia too.
119

116
Hertz, 2013.
117
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, “Disorders and Diseases: Aphasia,” accessed January 5, 2014,
http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/Aphasia/.
118
Li Chen, Interview by author, email correspondence, October 24, 2013.
119
Ibid.
39

Chen’s self-diagnosis and assessment of the political conditions of aphasia express a
central critique operating throughout Occupy Bay Area—albeit approached and
represented differently by each artist—that points to the inherent paradox embedded in
the dominant systemic structures (especially contemporary democracy, but also within
traditional cultural institutions) operating under a hegemony of political thought, or a
single perspective.
120
Which is to say, the work represented in the exhibition can be
understood as direct reactions to the lack of agonism in our post-political societies which
political theorist Chantal Mouffe has argued “is the origin of the crisis of representative
democracy today.”
121

Therefore, through Occupy Bay Area Hertz sought to bring the efforts and talents
of artists, designers, and activists producing work in support of the Occupy movement to
the attention of a larger audience, to create a space for talking about art and activism, but
also—and perhaps most importantly— to create a focal point for discussion outside
normative platforms of communication related to the issues and the activities of the
Occupy struggle in the Bay Area.
122

Developed in support of Occupy Bay Area and as an opportunity to discuss larger
issues that transcend the scope of the exhibition, Hertz together with art historian Robert
Atkins organized a panel discussion and forum titled REVOLT! RE-IMAGINE!
OCCUPY! Representation in Politics & Art.
123
Central themes pertinent to the discussion
involved Occupy's relationship with art and communications media, and also art's

120
Political theorist Chantal Mouffe in conversation with Biljana Đorđević and Julija Sardelić in May 2013 whilst at
the Subversive Forum in Zagreb, http://www.citsee.eu/interview/vibrant-democracy-needs-agonistic-confrontation-
interview-chantal-mouffe.
121
Ibid. For more on Chantal Mouffe’s political theories and the need for greater agonism refer to her book On
122
Betti-Sue Hertz, Interview by author, email correspondence, November 30, 2013.
123
Ibid.
40

relationship to activist politics in an era of digital communications.
124
While the panel
discussion took place in the gallery at YBCA, the event was recorded and uploaded to
YouTube and remains available on the web.
125

Without question, the institutionalization of Occupy by Portraits from the
Occupation and Occupy Bay Area could be viewed and criticized as counterintuitive to
the goals of the Occupy movement, a co-option by the art world, a misrepresentation, a
voyeuristic endeavor, etc., as is common in postmodern arguments against the re-
contextualization of site-specific and political work.
126
Yet, in relation to these
exhibitions, the latter are in fact stark contradistinctions to the inherent political and
social possibilities garnered by the influence of a museum platform.
127
In fact, the works
in both exhibitions resonate with what art critic Arlene Raven has identified as “art in the
public interest.”
128
Raven has argued:
[A]rt in the public interest is activist and communitarian in spirit; its modes of
expression encompass a variety of traditional media, including painting and
sculpture, as well as nontraditional media—street art, guerrilla theater, video,
page art, billboards, protest actions and demonstrations, oral histories, dances,
environments, posters, murals […] art in the public interest forges direct
intersections with social issues. It encourages community coalition-building in
pursuit of social justice and attempts to garner greater institutional empowerment
for artists to act as social agents. They demand more artist involvement in
institutional decision-making, representation of minorities and women artists, and
use of the influence of museum and funding agencies to change government
policies on social issues.
129

Yet, within the confines of a hegemonic media structure, it proves useful to
consider from what position does a cultural producer have agency to speak? How can an

124
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, REVOLT! RE-IMAGINE! OCCUPY! Representation in Politics & Art,
September 21, 2012, Youtube, accessed October 1, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jthBdyw7cM0.
125
Ibid.
126
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
2004), 12.
127
Ibid, 18.
128
Arlene Raven, Art in the Public Interest, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 18.
129
Ibid, 18.
41

artist, curator, or journalist through their positions within a cultural institution—
historically characterized as public intuitions with the agency to construct cultural, social,
and public identity—disrupt normative perspectives around a politically contested topic
such as Occupy? What strategies are being used to address these critiques from within
each codified museum framework? The influence of such a centralized public platform
has the potential in the twenty-first century to function with heightened critical efficacy
as the result of being an anchored focal point amidst the current haphazard flux of
decentralized and desensitized aesthetics and information.
Keeping this sense of the politics of representation in mind, we will next turn to
the specificities of each museum structure and the multiplicity of meanings and
implications of said projects through the lens of the museum context.
130
We will return to
a consideration of positions and regimes of power in relation to issues of agency from
within the institution through an interrogation into the spatial conditions characterizing
both Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area in Chapter Four.

Figure 17: Exhibition view #2 of
Occupy Bay Area, Yerba Buena Center
for the Arts, Upstairs Gallery, 2012

Photograph courtesy of Occupy Bay
Area Archive

130
Peter Vergo (1989) coined the idea for “the new museology” during a time when museums were suffering funding
pressures and cut-backs because they were often perceived to be elitist and inaccessible. This “new museology” argued
for increased emphasis on the visitors and their experience, including new thinking about museum education and the
importance of accessibility. For more on the history of “the new museology” refer to Jennifer Barrett book, Museums
and the Public Sphere (Chichester ;Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
42

Figure 18: Exhibition view #3 of Occupy Bay Area, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
Upstairs Gallery, 2012

Photograph courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Figure 19: Exhibition view #4 of Occupy Bay Area, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
Upstairs Gallery, 2012

Photograph courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
43

Chapter 3: Unhinging the Museum

3.1 The New Museum Paradigm
With the onset of the Information Age, art museums have been forced to
reevaluate and amend their institutional practices towards new models of civic
engagement that are more adept to serving a public living in a society inundated with
visual imagery.
131
New modes of sociality enabled through networking sites such as
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have dramatically reshaped the relationship between
museums and public culture in terms of knowledge production and power relations.
132
As
a result, the twenty-first century art museum has entered into a global flow of information
operating beyond the local, ultimately situating these institutions within a wider network
of interconnected cultural, political, social, and economic contexts.
133

Central to this paradigmatic shift and the subsequent reconfiguration of the
museum are questions about the relationship between museums and the changing ideas
around what constitutes the “public.”
134
This ongoing desire to become more relevant to
“the public” is nothing new and is now well known and documented (Bennett, 1995,
2004; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; McClellan, 1994). For instance, Jennifer Barrett notes in
her book Museums and the Public Sphere:
In the late eighteenth-century Europe, in particular, a tendency to conflate the
state with “the public” becomes common. To this day, this conflation is still often
assumed. This tends to be one of the key tenets in the history of museums where
their role is perceived as both an institution of the state (representative) and of the
public (of the people). With this also comes an assumption that the museum is a
public space: for the public, of the public. In this sense, the discourse about the

131
Ibid.
132
Ibid.
133
Ibid.
134
Jennifer Barrett, Museums and the Public Sphere (Chichester ;Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 1-14.
44

museum and the public sphere intersects with discourses central to modern
democracies, their cultures and institution’s.
135

According to Barrett the museum in the twenty-first century is not simply a public space,
but also “a site for and of the public sphere,” or in other words, a space of public
address.
136
This assertion presumes that the museum is a site where public discourse
takes place—claims that can be found in museology writings describing the significance
of the museum (Bennett, 1995; McClellan, 1994, 2008; Weil, 2002; Heumann Gurian,
2005).
137
Barrett writes:
In turn, the public, as audience, assumes that the space of the museum is public
space. The exhibitions are conceived for the public, and the subject matter is
therefore considered to be of public importance.
138

These notions of the museum as a public space, a site engendering public discourse, are
useful in understanding how OMCA and YBCA function within the specificities of Bay
Area urban society and in relation to their intended audiences. As we will see below,
OMCA and YBCA have evolved out of very different structures, yet both institutions
consistently strive towards identification as an accessible, public space that encourages
democratic practices.

3.2 The Oakland Museum of California: an Institution (for the People)
As the institution that mounted Portraits from the Occupation, The Oakland
Museum of California (OMCA) is at once a museum of tradition and innovation—an
institution originally conceived as a grand social experiment to revitalize the city center

135
Ibid, 6.
136
Ibid, 9.
137
Ibid, 11.
138
Ibid, 11.
45

by converging three historically independent disciplines —art, history, and natural
science—into one mega museum complex.
139
While following “new museology” trends
to adopt new media technologies by promoting an online exhibition, the history and
location of OMCA’s physical site are inextricably attached to the museum’s public
identity and have consequently shaped its institutional structure.
Situated at the juncture of Oak and 10th streets right outside downtown Oakland
and to the west of Lake Merritt, OMCA is part of a broadly diverse, middle-to-lower
income neighborhood. Occupying more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space on
four-city blocks, OMCA is one of the largest cultural institutions in the San Francisco
Bay Area and the only museum devoted exclusively to the art, history, and natural
environment of California.
140

Financed by a $6.6 million public bond, the museum first
opened its doors on May 1, 1969 with the aspiration of implementing some of the era’s
most progressive ideas about museum structural models. As such, Pritzker prize–winning
architect Kevin Roche was enlisted to design the building, which to this day remains an
architectural staple in the City of Oakland and represents one of the most significant
architectural examples of mid-century modernism in the United States.
141
Reminiscent of
a Babylonian terrace garden, the structure is fluidly built into the urban landscape around
it, combining multi-leveled terraces of indoor and outdoor spaces enabling the museum to
integrate itself into the physicality of the City of Oakland—as if a natural extension of the

139
Carol Kino, “Giving Museum Goers What They Want,” The New York Times, May 13, 2010, accessed June 4, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/arts/design/16oakland.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
140
Oakland Museum of California, “City of Oakland Agenda Report: Informational Report from the Oakland Museum
of California on Progress with its Capital Renovation Project and Campaign and Highlights of 2008 Exhibitions and
Educational Programs,” May 13, 2008, accessed on January 5, 2014,
http://clerkwebsvr1.oaklandnet.com/attachments/19150.pdf.
141
“Architecture + Gardens,” The Oakland Museum of California, accessed June 4, 2013,
http://museumca.org/architecture-gardens.
46

Figure 20: Exterior view of Oakland Museum of California, 2012
Photograph courtesy of SF Gate

public sphere. Since its inception, the architectural design aimed to function as an
accessible public space, a place purposed for social engagement (fig. 20).
142

While this description evokes a somewhat romanticized past, a utopic vision of
“the people’s museum,” in reality OMCA has faced a range of difficult roadblocks and
complex institutional changes over the course of its forty-year history. Originally funded
and entirely operated by the City of Oakland, the museum’s financial structure gradually
evolved into a joint budgetary model between the city and the Oakland Museum of
California Foundation (OMCF).
143
By 2010, the museum was operating between separate

142
Kino.
143
Matthai Kuruvila, “Non Profit May Take Over Oakland Museum,” SF Gate, November 21, 2010, accesses on June
4, 2013, http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Nonprofit-may-take-over-Oakland-Museum-3245515.php#photo-
2329152.
47

nonprofit and city budgets, employees, benefits, and governing bodies.
144
Even computer
servers, office supplies, and file cabinets were segregated.
145
In 2011, the city reported a
$58 million deficit, and as a result of the foundation's success at raising money on its
own, Oakland relinquished all control of its 42-year rein over OMCA. By July 2011,
OMCA was entirely run and operated by the foundation.
146

The transition from a state-run to non-profit museum did not come without a set
of controversies and internal tensions.
147
Prior to the financial restructuring, 44 of the
museum’s 110 staff members were city employees; the remaining staff members were
hired and employed through the foundation.
148
Following the shift in ownership
previously mixed funding sources that had gone into staff salaries and benefit plans had
to be restructured.
149
As a result, pre-existing city employees were relocated to other city
jobs; others retired, while some were laid off.
150
According to a press statement from
OMCA Executive Director Lori Fogarty, laid off workers were eligible to apply for
available positions at the museum and at the foundation, although all job descriptions
preceding the change were revised.
151

Adopted in the process of the institution’s revitalization was an interest in
producing experimental exhibitions that sought to engage a more diverse segment of the
public. Since its reopening in 2010 following a massive two-year $58 million renovation
project, OMCA has mounted a range of exhibitions in this vein including The 1968

144
Ibid.
145
Ibid.
146
Anne Eigman, “City of Oakland Cuts Ties to the Oakland Museum of California,” Non Profit Quarterly, June 13,
2011, accessed on June 4, 2013, http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/updates/13081-city-of-oakland-cuts-ties-to-
oakland-museum-of-california.html.
147
Ibid.
148
Ibid.
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid.
151
Ibid.
48

Exhibit, All of Us or None: Social Justice Posters of the San Francisco Bay Area,
Question Bridge: Black Males, and The Marvelous Museum: A Project by Mark Dion.
152

In the latter example, artist Mark Dion, who was invited to curate an exhibition from
OMCA’s vast collection of over 1.9 million objects, (re) situated curator René de
Guzman’s office inside one of the gallery spaces—literally moving all of his office
materials including books, lamps, file cabinets, and a desk into the exhibition. de Guzman
worked from his new office location atop a white pediment surrounded by a thin rope for
the duration of the show.
153
This gesture points to OMCA’s recent quest for greater
transparency between the institution and its public. Similar to Claire Bishop’s analysis of
an earlier work by Dion at the Bronbeek museum in the Netherlands, Dion’s intervention
at OMCA “addressed the display system of the museum but also a situation of conflict
there.”
154
de Guzman had joined OMCA in 2007 to lead the planning and execution of
the revitalization plan of the Gallery of California Art, and through the institutional
changes he instated came to represent OMCA’s shift towards a more experimental and
socially engaged museum. Coincidentally, de Guzman was one of the founding staff
members at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and worked at the museum for fifteen
years prior to taking the position at OMCA.
155

Shortly after joining OMCA, de Guzman worked with grant writers, the museum
director, and others to procure a substantial grant from the James Irvine Foundation that

152
Oakland Museum of California, Past Exhibitions, accessed January 5, 2014, http://museumca.org/exhibitions/past.
153
Ibid.
154
Claire Bishop notes that Bronbeek is a museum attached to the royal home for retired veterans in the Netherlands,
“whose collection comprised objects that Dutch soldiers and sailors had brought back from their overseas missions
(stuffed animals, plant specimens, ethnographic objects, and so on.”; Bishop, 200.
155
The Oakland Standard, “René de Guzman,” accessed January 30, 2014,
http://museumca.org/theoaklandstandard/rené-de-guzman.
49

enabled the museum to conduct extensive audience research.
156
Following a year of
research and amidst the height of OMCA’s internal restructuring, de Guzman established
a two-year experimental initiative, The Oakland Standard, intended to engage new local
audiences and expend the museum’s visibility within the community.

157
Discussed
briefly in Chapter 2 as the host website for Portraits from the Occupation, the aim of The
Oakland Standard encouraged a departure from current or traditional museum practices
towards more experimental initiatives—accomplishing museum goals through non-
incremental, traditionally codified procedures.
158
Furthermore, the audience research
indicated that despite the museum’s long presence in the community, less than 8% of the
people living in the immediate area were aware of OMCA and its programs.
159
Motivated
to improve these numbers, de Guzman brought on two outside individuals to assist with
the production and community outreach.
160
Hired on a two-year contract, writer Sasha
Archibald and artist/designer Stijn Schiffeleers worked exclusively on The Oakland
Standard albeit their offices were located on the OMCA complex.
161
de Guzman,
Archibald, and Schiffeleers together developed the concept and identity that would define
The Oakland Standard.
162
With tensions high between museum staff members awaiting
the eminent change, organizing efforts for The Oakland Standard began in February of
2011, officially making its debut on April 1, 2011.
163

Established as an experimental initiative and conscious of museum shifts towards
embracing new media technologies, de Guzman, Archibald, and Schiffeleers felt The

156
René de Guzman in conversation with the author, November 30, 2013.
157
Ibid.
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid.
160
Ibid.
161
Sasha Archibald in conversation with author, Los Angeles, CA, December 4, 2013.
162
René de Guzman in conversation with author, November 30, 2013.
163
Ibid.
50

Oakland Standard should have a large online presence.
164
After multiple failed attempts
to navigate the institutional bureaucracies and escalating tensions between city employees
and foundation employees, Archibald and Schiffeleers established an autonomous
website exclusively to house the varying projects enacted through The Oakland
Standard.
165
Comprised of 19 multi-form projects—including workshops, meals, films,
panels, and artist installations— both on their website and on the grounds of OMCA—
The Oakland Standard sought to revitalize OMCA’s reputation as a “sleepy museum” by
bringing local culture and issues relevant to the community into the museum through a
multi-media platform.
166

3.3 The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: A Kunsthalle Model

Located across the bay only 12 miles from OMCA in the bustling heart of
downtown San Francisco between the heavy tourist traffic on Market Street and the
newly constructed multiplex movie theater on Mission Street, the Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts (YBCA) arrived on the scene in October 1993, 19 years prior to mounting
Occupy Bay Area.
167
Situated amidst a conglomeration of art intuitions including the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), The Contemporary Jewish Museum, The
Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, the
neighborhood constitutes several dichotomies—it is at once an urban city center with a
tolerance for diversity and experimental living, but one that supports a prominent

164
Archibald in conversation with author, December 4, 2013.
165
Ibid.
166
The Oakland Standard, “Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 4, 2013.
167
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, “Visit,” accessed June 23, 2013, http://ybca.org/visit.
51

financial district embodying great traditionalism and conservatism; it is a locale where
high income earners live side by side large low income and homeless populations.
168

While officially opening in 1993, design plans for YBCA, which is part of the
Yerba Buena Gardens Cultural Center (YBGCC), were first initiated in 1980 by the San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) as a new “urban refuge”.
169
As a once
dilapidated area of the city, SFRA envisioned a public garden oasis in the center of
downtown that would simultaneously function as a diverse cultural complex.
170
Yet,
despite these utopic urban planning designs and not unlike OMCA, in practice the
development of YBGCC and YBCA faced complex challenges imbued with controversy
stemming as far back to the late 1950s when ideas for redevelopment were first
proposed.
171
As an aesthetic and political endeavor, the initial proposal hinged on the
simplistic mission of transforming an underused industrial area of the city into a thriving
tourist destination and thereby injecting new stimulus into San Francisco’s economy.
172

One of the most far-reaching debates on this redevelopment project was the presumed
displacement of residents, mostly Blue-collar factory workers, and subsequently how the
impact of a downtown expansion—culturally, socially, politically, and economically—
would suffuse the city and its people.
173
Those opposed to the proposal formed the
Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR) and demanded residents
be rehoused in low-income housing somewhere in the surrounding area.
174
The case
eventually went to court resulting in a win for the TOOR, which lead to further debates

168
Chester Hartman,City for Sale. The Transformation of San Francisco, (University of California Press: Berkeley,
2002),8.
169
Ibid.
170
Ibid.
171
Ibid, 8.
172
Ibid.
173
Ibid, 3.
174
Ibid, 8.
52

accusing the working-class community of delaying the Yerba Buena project.
175
Finally,
following the election of a new mayor George Moscone in 1976, a revised proposal
presenting significant cutbacks to its original scale successfully swayed city officials in
1980 giving SFRA the legal right to seize the land and begin work immediately.
176

In spite of these political tensions, today the two-city-block YBGCC site offers a
respite from the clamor of the city in a park-like setting that includes an open sprawling
lawn, landscaped gardens, restaurants, housing, and the Moscone Convention Center.
177

YBCA’s Fumihiko Maki-designed building spans the eastern edge of YBGCC and
consists of a 55,000 square foot two-story metal, glass and stone gallery and forum
building in addition to the Novellus Theater designed by James Stewart Polshek (fig.
21).
178
As a resting ground for citizens and tourists alike—a site often inhabited with an
array of sunbathers, busking musicians, families, students, or workers from the
surrounding area enjoying a quick lunch—YBGCC serves not only as a calming,
communal public space amidst the otherwise architecturally dense city-center, but also as
an urban site now closely associated with downtown San Francisco’s public identity—an
identity that has witnessed a drastic shift in economic activity and employment base,
from Blue-collar jobs to White-collar jobs.
179

175
Ibid.
176
Ibid.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid, “History”, accessed June 23, 2013, http://www.ybca.org/about/history.
179
Chester Hartman, 8; For more on the history of San Francisco’s urban redevelopments over the last 50 years refer to
Chester Hartman’s comprehensive book, City for Sale, The Transformation of San Francisco.
53

Figure 21: Exterior view of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2012
Photograph courtesy of RMW architecture & interiors

Sometimes at the cost of a political slippage between ideologies and economic
interests, major urban redevelopment plans are often justified on the grounds of the
collective public “good,” and in the end find their validation in the cultural realm.
180

Unlike most American art institutions, YBCA prides itself as emulating a European style
Kunsthalle—an art museum with no permanent collection.

181
Originating out of a
publically expressed need for “an accessible, high-profile San Francisco venue devoted to
contemporary visual art, performance, and film/video representing diverse cultural and
artistic perspectives,” YBCA has been known for nurturing emerging artists at the
forefront of their fields and presenting works that blend art forms and explore the events

180
Jennifer Barrett, 118.
181
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, History”, accessed June 23, 2013, http://www.ybca.org/about/history.
54

and ideas relevant to the twenty-first century and the San Francisco community.
182
Operating as a non-collecting intuition, YBCA strives to link contemporary art across
disciplines and expand preconceived notions of what constitutes “art” outside normative
perspectives and a traditional canonical lineage.
183
In conjunction with an interest in
engaging the social context and a history of mounting exhibitions addressing current
social and political issues, YBCA works within an institutional framework that seeks to
challenge traditional hegemonic museum structures and practices.
184

As a method for achieving these goals and investigating contemporary art, YBCA
established an internal structure they call “The Big Ideas,” consisting of four autonomous
themes: 1) ENOUNTER, Engaging the Social Context; 2) REFLECT, Considering the
Personal; 3) SOUR, The Search for Meaning, and, 4) DARE, Innovations in Art, Action,
Audience.
185
Using “The Big Ideas” as a lens through which to present a multiplicity of

182
Ibid.
183
Betti-Sue Hertz in conversation with the author, July 15, 2013.
184
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Annual Report 2011-2012, accessed June 25, 2013,
http://www.ybca.org/sites/default/files/annual_reports/ybca_annual_report_11-12.pdf.
185
The Big Ideas are broken down into four themes with a different set of goals. They are defined by YBCA as such:
“1) ENCOUNTER, Engaging the Social Context: Contemporary artists who come to YBCA are very often deeply
engaged with the social context. They are interested in exposing and challenging some of the inequities that exist in the
contemporary world and making us think more deeply about issues of social justice, creating change and striving for a
better world. Often they want to provoke us to some sort of change in behavior or action. But their work almost always
involves a confrontation, or an encounter, with reality and even truth; 2) REFLECT, Considering the Personal: The
power of the personal story is often at the core of an extraordinary art experience. By delving deeply into our own lives
through engagement with art, new insights are revealed to us that affect our understanding of ourselves in the world.
The power of art to make the individual story a universal experience is why we engage in art in a public setting—so we
can see ourselves in others and others in ourselves; 3) SOAR, The Search for Meaning: Moving well beyond the day-
to-day realities that are the substance of most of our thinking, many contemporary artists are creating artistic
experiences that allow us to extend ourselves into a transcendent realm, one that acknowledges the human need for
meaning. Beauty, wonder, joy—these are ideas that we are almost embarrassed to talk about in this age of irony and
cynicism. Yet, the inexplicable and unexplainable, and the impulse to reach for our higher selves, can still be a
transformative experience. In this time of conflict and strife, it is also something for which many of us yearn and to
which artists can respond; and, 4) DARE, Innovations in Art, Action, Audience: Contemporary art and contemporary
life is about risk. It’s about daring to see the world that does not exist and making incursions into the unknown.
Especially now, we find artists are experimenting with the boundary that seems to separate art and artist from audience.
Increasingly in our lives, engagement is not just about watching—it is about participating, shaping, integrating art and
audience in new ways. We welcome this movement by artists to create these powerful experiences and change the way
we think about art, audiences, and the world.” The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Annual Report 2011-2012,
accessed June 25, 2013.

55

art forms, each theme touches on different facets of contemporary art and sections of the
public YBCA strives to represent. Major exhibitions in recent years have included a
diverse range of shows such as Audience as Subject, Without Reality There is No Utopia,
Migrating Identities, and their ongoing signature triennial exhibition, Bay Area Now
featuring a multidisciplinary celebration of Bay Area artists and organizations embracing
experimental curatorial structures predicated on collaboration.
186

Considering both OMCA’s and YBCA’s historical social divisions—which later
propagated such intentional methodologies focused towards greater inclusion, diversity,
public engagement, and accessibility it would seem appropriate at this point to investigate
the resource distribution and fiscal sponsorships funding these two institutions. This is
not to simplify the interwoven politics, networks, and potential monetary influences of
these institutions and exhibitions, nor to ardently archive all of their complexities, but
rather to compose a broader picture of the resonant set of circumstances from which these
exhibitions were conceived.

3.3 Obstacles in Funding an Occupy Exhibition
Adhering to the requirements stipulated by the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) in
order to be considered a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, the codified structures from
which OMCA and YBCA operate consist, in both cases, of a Board of Trustees; members
on the board are responsible for overseeing all museum activities, managing the annual
budget, procuring sponsors, paying annual dues, and in most cases assisting in the
development of a strategic plan. Historically, these inherently hierarchical structures have
evoked frequent controversies around the politics of art funding and the freedom of artist

186
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bay Area Now 7, accessed February 5, 2014, http://www.ybca.org/ban7.
56

expression.
187
Contentious topics related to sociopolitical contemporary issues—such as
Occupy— have traditionally been difficult to represent in a museum exhibition and
frequently provoke controversy since they are inherently divisive and often engage moral
values, political ideologies, or religious beliefs (Cameron, 2006).
188
The dominant
concerns of staff and stakeholders in regards to exhibiting contentious topics relates to
the fear of losing funding support, risking the alienation of a major stakeholder, and
needing to remain “politically correct” in order to receive public funding.
189

This historical narrative is a useful framework for understanding the institutional
decision to financially support Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area,
particularly in relation to their Occupy thematic. As a movement seeking to draw
attention to the growing inequalities of wealth engendered by the existing governing
structures (including museums), Occupy as an exhibition theme inherently posed several
institutional hurdles for curators René de Guzman and Betti-Sue Hertz. For de Guzman,
the development of The Oakland Standard became essential for exhibiting Portraits from
the Occupation.
190
According to de Guzman:
Something potentially as controversial as Portraits from the Occupation would
not have made it through the normal vetting process of the museum. It would
have been worried about, added upon, and its life force would have been sucked
out. I'm trying not to be critical, but that is the sort of thing museums can
do. Too often...
191

For Hertz, controversy rested more with the risk of alienating sectors of the public—
especially Occupy activists who were opposed to the mounting of Occupy Bay Area—

187
Fiona Cameron, “Beyond Surface Representations: Museums, Edgy Topics, Civic Responsibilities and Modes of
Engagement,” Open Museum Journal, Vol. 8: Contest & Contemporary Society: Redefining Museums in the 21st
Century, edited by Andrea Witcomb & Fiona Cameron, (August 2006), accessed March 4, 2013,
http://hosting.collectionsaustralia.net/omj/vol8/pdfs/cameron-paper.pdf.
188
Ibid.
189
Ibid.
190
de Guzman in conversation with author, November 30, 2013.
191
Ibid.
57

rather than members on YBCA’s board.
192
YBCA has a history of committing to
progressive perspectives and causes, and as a non-collecting institution with a
sympathetic board they often have the flexibility to act quickly.
193
Yet when asked if
there were any internal oppositions to Occupy Bay Area at YBCA before the opening
Hertz explained:
Within YBCA there was support and encouragement. It's always tricky with
political shows as Occupy is not the mission of YBCA, but it's also not outside of
its mission to reflect on what's going on in the Bay Area on the ground whether
it's political posters, photos of the Black Panthers, questions about
participation/audience, etc. My shows are often self-reflexive of the institution
and the local context while not always as explicitly as in the Occupy Bay Area
exhibition.
194

More importantly, however, the variety of viewpoints around Occupy did not inhibit
Hertz from mounting Occupy Bay Area. In fact, the development of the exhibition played
out (systemically) much like any other YBCA exhibition—albeit the short six month
planning timeline.
195

192
Hertz in conversation with the author, July 15, 2013; in an interview with Betti-Sue Hertz, she elaborated on the
controversy between Occupy Bay Area and individuals opposed the YBCA’s approach to Occupy material. She stated,
“Before the show, after we had invited artists to participate, a few of those artists were involved in formulating a letter
that they circulated to other artists, which drew some criticism of our approach to the material and some
misinformation about ideas we were circulating about wanting to add the posters to a museum collection or university
archive. I think that some artists wanted the show to become part of Occupy, while I saw it more as a way to display
cultural production rather than a way to join the movement per se. That was one of the main differences between what
we did and what some artists seemed to want. I learned about this letter in a third hand way so it's best to get it from
someone else. Ultimately there was not enough support for this letter to be sent to YBCA and me. There were other
artists who were completely grateful and appreciative.”
193
Ibid.
194
Ibid.
195
Ibid.
58

Chapter 4: Embodiment and Spatial Realities in Politics and Art
4.1 The Virtual is Physical

As discussed in previous chapters, the convergence of computing and media
technologies resulting in ‘new medias’—such as the Internet, social media, and smart
phones since the 1980s—have culminated in a paradigm shift predicated on an
unprecedented level of interconnectivity.
196

The sociopolitical effects of the latter
phenomenon have enabled individuals to organize collective actions in new ways.
197
It is
therefore tempting to credit new medias as the principle driving force behind the mass
mobilization ignited by Occupy. Yet, this assumption eclipses the reality that the Occupy
movement garnered public attention and claimed political legitimacy (despite the
criticisms discussed in Chapter 1) through physical bodies moving in and around public
urban spaces.
198
Social scientist Merlyna Lim writes:
Even though some feel that the public demonstration is obsolete – that public
space no longer exists, or that power is now too fluid and dispersed to be
contested by gathered masses of people – staging the movement in urban public
space is still perceived as the most powerful way to collectively express dissent,
to express the strength of the movement, and, especially, to directly challenge the
power (enemy). Such public demonstration can also be a tool to grow the
movement (by recruiting new members) and to define collective identity for a
group/culture/movement.
199

This assertion does not suggest that digital medias are somehow irrelevant to the Occupy
movement; rather it helps to destabilize the binary logic of virtual/physical—suggesting
that the virtual is always also physical and that their spatial realities should not be

196
Ekaterina Stepanova, “The Role of Information Communication Technologies in the “Arab Spring:
IMPLICATIONS BEYOND THE REGION,” Policy Memo No. 159, PONARS Eurasia, May 2011, accessed
September 20, 2013, http://ponarseurasia.com/sites/default/files/policy-memos-pdf/pepm_159.pdf.

197
David Joselit, After Art, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1.
198
Merlyna Lim, REALITY BYTES: THE DIGITALLY-MEDIATED URBAN REVOLUTIONS, The Architecture
Review, April 24, 2012, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.architectural-review.com/view/broader-view/reality-
bytes-the-digitally-mediated-urban-revolutions/8629140.article.
199
Ibid.
59

understood as autonomous realms.
200
In other words, physical bodies are still very much
attached to spatial reality.
201
New medias facilitate a sociality that transcends localities,
enabling transnational organization, however, those same platforms subsequently invite
people back to interact with physical space—as clearly evidenced in the key role of the
encampment(s) as a strategy of protest in the Occupy movement, as well as the mass
demonstrations carrying out the November 2
nd
general strike and shutdown of the Port of
Oakland.
202

However, in the contemporary urban world challenged by increasing
privatization, public spaces as sites to build networks for potential social movements
have become a rarity.
203
Thus, in a context where physical civic spaces are increasingly
repressed, social media can emerge as an alternative space for individuals to
clandestinely organize and strategize collective actions that ultimately transpire in
physical space.
204
The significance of this for Merlyna Lim lies in the fact that:
Social movement effectively consolidates by its invisibility (to authority); the vast
and convivial digital media provides the space for this mechanism. In contrast, it
must claim its power with visibility, which can only be done by either ‘occupying’
public space and/or ‘opening’ public space. In this context, public space (to be
occupied or opened) is identified through its meanings, symbols, narratives and
histories associated with the space; how power is perceived in relation to (public)
space in a certain length of time is related to the identification of spaces for public
demonstration.
205

As such, the entanglement of new medias, urban spaces, and social movements can be
understood in relation to a system of networks.
206
These networks are not necessarily

200
Ibid.
201
Ibid.
202
Ibid.
203
Ibid; James C Scott in his book Dominations and the Arts of Resistance (1990) coined the term ‘hidden transcript,’
used for the critique of power that goes on offstage, and of which power-holders are unaware.
204
Ibid.
205
Merlyna Lim, REALITY BYTES: THE DIGITALLY-MEDIATED URBAN REVOLUTIONS, The Architecture
Review, April 24, 2012.
206
Ibid.
60

placeless, but rather work as frameworks to connect specific places—public spaces that
establish meaning through identity politics contextualized by definitive conditions of time
and place.
207
These places, in particular public spaces in contemporary neoliberal cities,
are still the points of convergence for resistances and revolutions.
208
From this vantage
point, contemporary art museums are uniquely positioned as public institutions still tied
to a physical location amidst an urban environment to respond to current events on the
one hand and to local communities on the other—particularly in regards to the declining
interest in public life and the resulting tensions between democracy and its actors.

4.2 Presentation Formats Through the Exhibition Lens
With these spatial considerations in mind, it is possible to discuss the structural
organization and modes of presentation of Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy
Bay Area across sociospacial boundaries (virtual/physical). Similarly, they represent two
exhibitions connected to the embodiment of physical space, both related to the Occupy
thematic and their relative physical sites embodied by OMCA and YBCA. While Occupy
Bay Area took shape in the physical space of the Upstairs Gallery at YBCA, Portraits
from the Occupation played out on the web-based platform hosted by The Oakland
Standard. Yet the extent to which both exhibition tactics seek “to inform and thereby
mobilize”—to use Crimp’s terms—unifies these exhibitions far greater than their spatial
conditions differentiate them.
In Portraits from the Occupation, the actual interviews were conducted in person
at different times, and at varying physical locations around Oakland. These locations

207
Ibid.
208
Nicholas Whybrow, Performance and the Contemporary City: An Interdisciplinary Reader, (Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire ;New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
61

were determined by the participants and include domestic, public, and commercial
spaces, yet the final presentation took form on the web. This format, consequently,
renders the online interface an essential component to the exhibition of the work, not
dissimilar to the role of a physical gallery space in presenting three-dimensional, object-
based work(s) as in Occupy Bay Area. Taking into consideration the aesthetic parameters
inherent in the structure of web-based platforms, and also informed by a methodology
centered on limiting their subjective authorship, Abramovich and Raven refrain from
editing the interviews into a single video format—akin to a more traditional documentary
style film edited and/or repurposed in support of an overarching narrative—and choose to
present the sixteen interviews through a multi-channel video platform.
209
As such, the
black and white video thumbnails organized into horizontal rows of four and set against a
solid white background, together form a uniform, grid-like composition. The thumbnail
images signify the physical identity of each participant, yet personal information becomes
visible only through viewer activation. While evocative of a newsreel—short
documentary films addressing current events prominent in the first half of the twentieth
century—the presentation utilized here, unlike the constructed narrative employed in the
latter format, emphasizes the autonomy of each individual through uninterrupted clips
and stand-alone videos.
210
This stylistic technique seeks to dismantle, rather than
perpetuate, notions of hierarchy between the actors by aesthetically equalizing the modes
of representation.
211
Further, by intentionally omitting a contextual trajectory for the
viewer to follow, Abramavich and Raven establish a non-linear participatory narrative
transferring, in a sense, the interpretive authority into the hands of the viewer. Although a

209
Ibid.
210
The Oakland Standard, “Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 4, 2013.
211
Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven, Interview by author, digital recording, Berkeley, August 13, 2013.
62

virtual piece, Portraits from the Occupation is nonetheless a collection of specific
“bodies” in physical space organized “horizontally.”
In Occupy Bay Area, the modes of presentation were inextricably contextualized
by the physical spatiality of the gallery. As such, Hertz deployed a more traditional
strategy for presenting the works predicated on a curatorial methodology that favors the
presentation of object-based work over, say, process-based work like certain strings of
social practice.
212
In an interview with the curator, Hertz explains:
My method is rather traditional truthfully. I believe that exhibitions should be
spaces for dialogue triggered by artistic or cultural objects (or actions); and that
artists are in a special position to add emotion and ambiguity and questioning to
what often becomes black and white, either/or, them or us discourses. Protest or
propaganda art, as some would call it is clear in its ambitions to support a cause.
The presentation of the Occupy material was important and ultimately seeing
these works as both active and still in play on the ground and also "collectible for
archive purposes" for future consideration made sense to me.
213

Nevertheless, the presentation of the works is perhaps atypical among contemporary art
exhibitions in that the posters, photographs, and prints are exhibited without a frame or
any other type of physical barrier separating the viewer and the object. This stylistic
technique attempts to present the works—particularly the posters—as one might have
encountered them in situ.
The posters in the exhibition were designed as information tools—as placards
reproduced in the thousands and handed out freely— to be utilized to transmit a plurality
of political messages during Occupy actions.
214
The interactivity and participatory traits
of these posters engenders them collaborative works and in many ways relocates meaning
from the art object (i.e. the poster) to the phenomenological model of lived bodily

212
Ibid.
213
Ibid.
214
Donohue.
63

experience; in other words, the interaction between individuals in public space(s)
presupposes their meaning.
215
For instance, poster artist Chuck Sperry stated in an
interview for the San Francisco Bay Guardian:
You could use this poster as a placard, hold it up over your head. It would make
quite an impression and be useful to the action. I stood at Oscar Grant Plaza next
to the street and passed out nearly 1000 posters in 45 minutes to the front of the
march, so when television cameras picked up the action at the Port of Oakland,
the front of the march was a sea of my poster with the message, ‘This Is Our City,
And We Can Shut It Down.’
216

Significantly, the reproducibility of these posters relegates authorship from the
artist to the conditions of the Occupy movement in a Barthesian performance of the
“death of the author.”
217
In this sense, the site-specificity and efficacy of these posters
corresponds to what art critic Miwon Kwon writes in her critical book One Place After
Another: Site-Specificity and Locational Identity:
[C]urrent forms of site-oriented art, which readily take up social issues ( often
inspired by them), and which routinely engage the collaborative participation of
audience groups for the conceptualization and production of the work, are seen as
means to strengthen art’s capacity to penetrate the sociopolitical organization of
contemporary life with greater impact and meaning […] the chance to conceive
the site as something more than a place—as repressed ethnic history, a political
cause, a disenfranchised social group—is an important conceptual leap in
redefining the public role of art and artists.
218

Thus the central issue preoccupying critics of the Occupy Bay Area exhibition has been
the (re) contextualization of these posters (and other Occupy related art) in a museum
setting, which raises questions—as Crimp suggested it would— about audience, location,
and means of distribution.
219
Yet these criticisms regress to an early traditional modernist

215
Kwon, 12.
216
Donohue.
217
Kwon, 31; Roland Barthes wrote a critical essay “The Death of the Author,” in which he argues that a text’s
meaning rests not in the author but in the viewer. For more refer to Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, “The Death of
the Author,” Image, Music, Text, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-148.
218
Ibid, 30.
219
Crimp, 7.
64

argument predicated on the idea that re-presenting site-specific work in a museum
context voids, as Kwon writes, “the meaning of the work as it was first established in
relation to the site of its original context.”
220
In contrast, in the context of Occupy Bay
Area, the physical site of YBCA functioned not in weakening the efficacy of the posters,
but rather helped heighten their visibility through an alternative public platform at a
critical moment when political posters were being banned from hanging in public spaces
around Oakland.
221
According to the Department of Facilities & Environment: Keep
Oakland Clean & Beautiful Division of the Public Works Agency in the City of Oakland:
Political signs on public property will be removed and disposed of […] Public
property includes but is not limited to sidewalks, curbs, streets, paths, medians,
and City of Oakland owned property (improved and vacant). Structures
considered public property might include public trees, litter containers, street light
poles, electrical cabinets, utility poles, parking meters, and fire hydrants.
222

Further, Sperry stated in response to posters being exhibited in Occupy Bay Area:
[N]o political art on the streets of Oakland. Period. So all the money that’s usually
spent cleaning up the bubble graffiti is being spent wiping out political posters for
the first time, probably, in my lifetime […] So it’s pretty amazing that, you know,
these posters are not done working, these posters are still working, these are
working posters.
223

Having lost their longstanding power to remain visible in the community beyond a single
demonstration, the exhibition of these Occupy posters helped mobilize their information
in spite of their continued erasure from the streets of Oakland.

220
Kwon, 43.
221
Ibid.
222
Frank Foster, “Standard Operating Procedures,” Department of Facilities & Environment: Keep Oakland Clean &
Beautiful Division, date issued September 24, 2010, date revised June 21, 2012, accessed January 15, 2014,
http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca1/groups/cityadministrator/documents/webcontent/oak037066.pdf.
223
“Occupy Art Gallery: the movement gets an exhibit at YBCA,” Crosscurrents, National Public Radio, (San
Francisco, CA: KALW, September 17, 2012).
65

4.3 Exhibitions as Pedagogy
At this point what emerges from the disaggregation of Occupy viewpoints
presented in both Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area correlates to
certain art historical themes discussed by Claire Bishop in her recent book Artificial
Hells.
224
While the latter focuses predominately on the specificities of socially engaged
participatory art engendered over the last century, Bishop’s historical narrative
nevertheless points out resonances to critical topics in this study—including a critique of
the blurring of the lines between activism and aesthetics, in addition to an illuminating
discussion around the rupture in authoritarian curatorial models towards practices
interested in the transference of knowledge and greater social empowerment through
collective public awareness.
225

In a chapter dedicated to surveying the production and reception of participatory
art since the fall of communism in 1989, Bishop traces the immergence of leftist political
thinking into artistic production during the 1990s.
226
During this period we see a rise in
the term “project” when describing art that aspired to replace idealistic notions with more
open-ended, research-based, socially conscious forms.
227
In tracing the disciplinary shifts
and re-emergence of a social turn in contemporary art, Bishop describes these practices in
the United States as “activist in orientation” resulting from the AIDS crisis (as evidenced
in Crimp’s article), the ensuing ‘cultural wars’ over NEA funding, and the rise of site-
specific curating focused on embedding the artist in the social field.
228

224
Bishop, Artificial Hells.
225
Ibid, 243; Bishop notes that institional critique in art arrived at the same time as education’s own self-examination,
most notably in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968).
226
Ibid, 194.
227
Ibid .
228
Ibid, 195.
66

Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area were not officially identified
as “projects,” yet they exemplify a type of exhibition framework that emphasized open-
endedness, experimentation, and social awareness positioning them within an art
historical lineage akin to critical art practices (flourishing in the ‘90s) imbued with
sociological tendencies such as Martha Rosler’s How Do We Know What Home Looks
Like?—a work comprised of video interviews and statistical information relevant to the
inhabitants.
229
Experimental exhibitions during this period developed as a direct response
to the conventions of exhibition making carried over from the 1980s: a model based
around the display of objects for the consumption of the market.
230
For this generation of
cultural producers, authoritative renunciation emerged and curators began to position
themselves as collaborators or facilitators working alongside the artist.
231
With a rise in
artistic and curatorial interests around developing collaborative projects with socially
marginalized groups, the exhibition became a site of production rather than just a site of
display.
232

It is significant, then, that Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area
were both collaborative endeavors—between citizens, artists, curators, and museums—
that manifest particularly in an exhibition format. The foci of these exhibitions in
museums establish a tighter and stronger framework capable of transferring knowledge

229
Ibid, 198.
230
Ibid, 207.
231
Ibid, 208; Bishop describes the curator as collaborator as “a position no unlike that of the community artist working
to facilitate lay creativity. This desire for open-endedness formed part of a generational value-system that rejected
prescriptive meanings tout court; for [curator Eric] Troncy, [Nicholas] Bourriaud and their collaborators, open-
endedness stood against the closed meanings of critical art in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” In this context tout court can be
translated as “ in short” or with no addition or qualification; simply.
232
Ibid, 219;For more on the history of this development during the post-’89 period refer to chapter 8, “Delegated
Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” in Bishop, Artificial Hells.
67

and empowering the public than the (unframed) artworks could on their own.
233
This is
not to diminish the quality of the individual works, but instead to argue that the
relationships and conceptualization of the ensemble of works and participants, rather than
the individual objects and perspectives, strengthen the overall efficacy of these two
exhibitions to “inform and thereby mobilize.”
234

This assertion, however, elicits an essential problem of reception between ‘first
audiences’ of museumgoers and ‘secondary audiences’ of the larger [general] public
faced by all pedagogical exhibitions today.
235
Yet Bishop argues that:
[M]ost artistically successful instances of pedagogy-as-art […] manage to
communicate an educational experience to a secondary audience […] through
modes that are time-based or performative: through video […], the exhibition
[…], the lecture […] or the publication. The secondary audience is ineliminable,
but also essential, since it keeps open the possibility that everyone can learn
something from these projects.
236

Thus, Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area represent performative modes
of ‘pedagogy-as-art,’ two transversal cultural practices that sought to communicate the
complexity of Occupy in the Bay Area within both the social and aesthetic realm. They
blur the lines between aesthetics and activism, yet as Félix Guattari suggests in his book

233
Ibid, 217; This relates to Bishops focus on exhibitions (rather than individual works) when framing her discussion of
art’s renewed interest in the social during the early 1990s.
234
Crimp, 7.
235
Bishop, 272; When discussing aesthetic education Bishop turns to Friedrich Schiller’s twenty-eight Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of man published in 1795. She writes: “The same problem of actual or ideal education, a universal
audience or specific students, faces all pedagogically oriented art projects today. Very few of these projects manage to
overcome the gap between a ‘first audience’ of student participants and a ‘second audience’ of subsequent viewers.”
236
Ibid.
68

Chaosmosis (1993) they embody the ‘double finality’ necessary for protecting against the
threat of art’s self-extinction amidst the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries.
237

In this context, collaborative cultural practices (in the contemporary museum
model) engaging a socially relevant political topic — such Portraits from the Occupation
and Occupy Bay Area — are brought to life by viewing the exhibition itself as a form of
public address expressed unambiguously (through interviews, information, site-specific
political art, historical precedents, new medias, and so on) as a ‘total argument.’
238
The
latter is reinforced—albeit through different types of display—by the pragmatic gesture
of choosing to mount a socially conscious exhibition around the contentious topics of
Occupy.

237
Ibid; Bishop critiques the blurring of the lines between aesthetics and activism within current forms of socially
engaged art, stating that “art blurring entirely into life risks the ‘perennial possibility of eclipse.” When referring to
Félix Guattari Bishop writes, “projects must tread the fine line of a dual horizon—faced towards the social field but
also towards art itself, addressing both its immediate participants and subsequent audiences. [They] need to be
successful within both art and the social field, but ideally also testing and revising the criteria we apply to both
domains. Without this double finality, such projects risk becoming ‘edu-tainment’ or ‘pedagogical aesthetics.’ […] If
artists ignore the double finality, viewer may rightfully wonder whether Guattari’s question should in fact be reversed:
how do we bring a work of art to life as though it were a classroom?
”
Guattari’s orginal question was, “ how do we
bring a classroom to life as it were a work of art?”
238
Ibid, 200; Bishop describes the 1993 curatorial tactics of Valeria Smith in the exhibition ‘Sonsbeek 93.’ Bishop
writes, “What emerges […] is not just a case study in site-specific curating, but the clear impression that the curator is
no longer a mediator between artist and public (in the museum model), but someone with a clear desire to co-produce a
socially relevant art for multiple audiences, and who views the exhibition itself as a total argument.”
238

69

Conclusion
Bishop’s articulate theorizations in Artificial Hells are certainly formative for this
investigation, yet what Bishop’s thinking misses—particularly in relation to Portraits
from the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area— are the important insights on the
inextricable relationship between the potentiality of socially conscious art exhibitions to
‘inform’ and the economic structures underpinning contemporary art museums in the
United States. It would seem an oversight, then, to evaluate the efficacy of these
exhibitions without a consideration of the larger economic and political systems in which
they unavoidably operate.
In contemporary art discourse, one of the dominant contributions to this
[economic] discussion is represented in Andrea Fraser’s critical contribution to the 2012
Whitney Biennial titled “There’s no place like home.”
239
Through this text, Fraser seeks
to address the art world’s “symbiotic, if not parasitic, relationship to extreme wealth and
inequality,” but also suggests that the realities of these disjointed conditions and the art
world’s overt participation in a “winner-take-all’ market economy can no longer—and
should no longer— be ignored.
240
Fraser’s text argues that despite recent museological
writings and practices over the past two decades that have challenged, redefined, and
expanded the traditional role of the museum characterized as simply a receptacle for
objects, traditions, typologies, culturally-sanctioned knowledge and hegemonic meta-
narratives, it would be misleading to suggest a proliferation of such transformations

239
Andrea Fraser, “There’s no place like home,” Whitney Biennial 2012, (Yale University Press, 2012).
240
Ibid, 29.
70

exists across the field.
241
In reality, most American art museums remain at the core
philosophically unchanged.
242

As evidenced by the lack of museum engagement with the Occupy movement,
these realities become all the more obvious. Fraser writes:
IT IS WIDELY KNOWN that private equity managers and other financial
industry executives emerged as major collectors of contemporary art early in the
last decade and now make up a large percentage of the top collectors worldwide.
They also emerged as a major presence on museum boards. Many of these
collectors and trustees from the financial world were directly involved in the sub-
prime mortgage crisis […]. Many others have been vocal opponents of financial
reform as well as any increase in taxation or public spending in response to the
recession they precipitated […] At all levels of the art world, one finds extreme
wealth breezing past grinding poverty.

243

Turning to Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on art and its discourse, Fraser expands on his
reference to negation “in the Freudian sense,” to address not only the increasingly
fragmented art world and the inherent contradictions that lie within art discourse itself —
and simultaneously between discourse and practice—but also to suggest that this
fragmentation serves as a distancing mechanism, one that allows art world participants—
artists, curators, critics, historians—to disown unfavorable activities and their subsequent
participation in the very structures that fuels them.
244
She states:
Above all, perhaps, they save us from confronting the social conflicts we live, not
only externally but also within ourselves, in our own relative privilege and
relative privation, by splitting these positions into idealized and demonized
oppositions, to be inhabited or expelled according to their defensive function and
the loss, or threat of loss, with which they are associated.
245

From this perspective, it would seem that for a museum curator and/or director to engage
Occupy, to confront the realities of the economic, social, and political inequalities fueling

241
Richard Sandell and Eithne Nightingale, Museums, Equality, and Social Justice, (New York: Routledge. 2012), 1.
242
Fraser, 29.
243
Ibid.
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.
71

the movement’s core ideologies, they themselves might have to confront their own
participation and activities within the very same hegemonic structures that engendered
them. Or, conversely, if not faced with this burden personally, a curator operating within
a codified institutional framework couched by a complex network of constituencies and
stakeholders wielding critical financial support, might negate the social import of
addressing a political movement like Occupy as a result of the potential implications that
could challenge the political agendas, moral values, or established orthodoxies of their
funders. Much like corporate media-conglomerates’ dependency on fiscal contributions,
American art museums—despite shifts in discourse that suggest a movement towards the
social and greater diversity— remain subordinate to the ideologies and economic
incentives of their funders.
The extent to which the negation addressed by Fraser’s text played a role in the
lack of contemporary art museum engagement with the Occupy movement in the United
States remains unclear, yet the production of Portraits from the Occupation and Occupy
Bay Area nevertheless demonstrate the potential for art museums—together with
curators, artists, and their constituencies—to navigate the dominant ideological order (be
it capitalism or representative democracy) by actively seeking to move theory into
practice; by ‘reflecting-in-action’; by mounting experimental exhibitions with no certain
72

outcome; and by actively critiquing art, critiquing the institutions into which it permeates,
and consciously participating in the collective movement towards structural change.
246

In the introduction to the book Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, Fiona
Cameron highlights how museum information now operates in an open-ended network of
meanings which increasingly play a role in mapping out a public space beyond the
physical space of the institution.
247
Cameron writes:
Because the space of information flows is now so flexible and interactive,
protocols of communication according to theorist Manuel Castells (2004) between
cultures in networks are not necessarily based on shared values but sharing the
value of communication.
248

Castells observation that the shared value of communication connects cultures in
networks more effectively than simply shared values resonates once again with Crimp’s
assertion that contemporary art does not need “a cultural renaissance,” but rather “ we
need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle” because until a solution is
reached “only information and mobilization can save lives.”
249
These interactions
between museum culture and public culture are closely aligned to what Bruno Latour
calls ‘object-oriented democracies.’ According to Latour (2005, 15), each of these
‘objects’ generates a different pattern of emotions, passions, opinions, agreements, and

246
Bishop, 273; Here Bishop argues that the “war is to be waged on two fronts: as a critique of art, and as a critique of
the institutions from which it permeates…”; Furthermore In the introduction to the book Hot Topics, Public Culture,
Museum Fiona Cameron writes, “The new museology has often expressed the need for museums to deal with complex
political and social issues, arguing that museum must develop a function of critique and see themselves as forum for
debate. Engaging such topics is an extension of the museum’s role in representing diversity and pluralism, however, a
reluctance to converse deeply with these subjects is based on a limited understanding of the roles and civic purposes of
museums in contemporary society; the social and political contexts in which institutions operate; and how these topics
might be purposefully interpreted and engaged in a changing and increasingly politicized world.”
246

247
Cameron, Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, 4-5.
248
Ibid.
249
Crimp, 8.
73

disagreements while bringing an assembly of people together each with their own
viewpoints and ways to achieve resolution.
250

To this end, the shared value of communication also significantly correlates to the
conclusion of Fraser’s text:
[M]aking note of the forces of repression at work and leaving open the way for
further associations that might lead to the relinking of intellectual process and
affective investment—and, eventually, to meaningful change. Indeed, it may be
that the way out of the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of the art world lies
directly within our grasp, not in the next artistic innovation— not, first of all, in
what we do—but in what we say about what we do: in art discourse. While a
transformation in art discourse would not, of course, resolve any of the enormous
conflicts in the social world or even within ourselves, it might at least allow us to
engage them more honestly and effectively.
251

As the title of Fraser’s essay suggests, “There’s no place like home,” ‘meaningful
change’ therefore can only occur from within [contemporary art museums] through
cultural practices actively “participating in the struggle.”
252
Thus, it is not a matter of
choosing sides—between models of activism and aesthetics, between virtual and physical
platforms, between the imaginary and the phenomenological.
253
Rather, we need to
understand—as Miwon Kwon argues—“seeming oppositions as sustaining relations.”
254

In other words, we need to confront agonism head on as a productive solution towards
greater inclusion, democratic representations, and structural change. Thus, Portraits from
the Occupation and Occupy Bay Area exist not as absolute solutions to the Occupy
struggle or the problematic of the museum as a site for sociopolitical activism; nor are
they a quest to escape the dominant [ideological] order (as Bishop characterizes certain

250
Cameron, Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, 4-5.
251
Fraser, 33.
252
Ibid; Crimp, 7.
253
Kwon, 166; In the last paragraph of her book One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,
Kwon argues that “it is not a matter of choosing sides—between models of nomadism and sedentariness, between space
and place, between digital interfaces and the handshake” in regards to our understanding of site-specificities in the 21
st

century.
254
Ibid, 166.
74

strands of socially engaged art), but more importantly, they represent cultural acts of anti-
negation, agonistic performances that manifested on the codified stage of the
contemporary public museum, and two cultural practices that actively participated in the
Occupy struggle. As the future of the ongoing Occupy movement remains uncertain,
these two exhibitions nevertheless serve as illuminating institutional and curatorial
models for American art museums seeking to (re) frame museums, (re)frame Occupy,
and ultimately, actively participate in the struggle; there is still time.

75

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis examines the implications, within art museums and in wider social, political, and economic contexts, of the cultural institutionalization of the recent Occupy movement. It offers a multi‐layered study of two museum exhibitions engendered by the significant outpour of Occupy actions in the California Bay Area: Portraits from the Occupation, supported by the Oakland Museum of California, and Occupy Bay Area, mounted by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The investigation centers not only on a historical analysis of the exhibitions themselves, but also on a significant commonality: beyond the obvious similarities rooted in the thematic, these exhibitions represent the only examples of American museum‐funded contemporary art exhibitions directly engaged with the Occupy movement. The shows are, in this sense, at the forefront of major shifts in curatorial practices and intended goals. The curatorial decision to take up Occupy as a thematic subject raises provocative questions about the densely textured interplay between museums as platforms for discursive and cultural production, and their role as sites of reflection and sociopolitical activism—including the problems and possibilities of this role. A close reading of these exhibitions is further informed by a discussion of their primary and secondary modes of distribution—museumgoers, occupy activists, and the larger [general] public. Finally, a discussion of the Occupy movement and the current state of media and politics in the United States leads to a greater understanding of these exhibitions as cultural platforms for concurrent reflection to delineate the new conditions of possibility for artists, curators, and cultural institutions arising from the multifaceted, hyper‐networked contemporary social landscape.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wallace, Nicole Valdes (author)

Core Title (Re) framing museums/Occupy (re) framed: two Occupy exhibitions in the California Bay Area

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/23/2014

Defense Date 03/25/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag activism,agnostic democracy,agonism,Alex Abramovich,art activism,Art History,art theory,Bay Area,Betti-Sue Hertz,California Bay Area,community engagement,contemporary art,contemporary social landscape,critical theory,cultural institutionalization,cultural production,curation,curator,curatorial practices,Economy,Exhibitions,hyper-networked,institutions,Internet art,journalism,Lucy Raven,mass movements,media framing,media in the United States,museum funding,museum studies,museums,museums in the 21st century,new media technologies,new museum,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oakland,Oakland Museum of California,Occupy,Occupy Bay Area,Occupy Oakland,Occupy San Francisco,Occupy Wall Street,political activism,Political movements,politics and art,public art,public engagement,reflection,René de Guzman,San Francisco,social movements,socially engaged art,sociopolitical activism,The Oakland Standard,theory,Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Brewer, Maura (committee chair), Halberstam, Jack (committee member), Wedell, Noura (committee member)

Creator Email nicolew1000@gmail.com,nvwallace@icloud.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-383289

Unique identifier UC11296576

Identifier etd-WallaceNic-2402.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-383289 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WallaceNic-2402.pdf

Dmrecord 383289

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Wallace, Nicole Valdes

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA