We’ve moved from inspiration to action.
Follow us at http://maydaygallery.tumblr.com/, to see the many wonderful public art and performance projects planned for May 1st.
Hope to see you, not just at our website but, most importantly, in the streets. Another world is coming. Let’s make it beautiful, together.
~ May 1st Arts
We have posted our call to create far and wide: http://ArtDeadline.Com
This is the second Arts Assembly, specifically targeted at different arts groups and artists within OWS, but also looking to expand our collaborations beyond the OWS crowd. Everyone is welcome.
We are particularly looking forward to making sure everyone has the resources to support the wonderful, creative, future-changing projects they are engaged in.
https://www.facebook.com/events/245657835530134/
Art Strike -> Creative Strike -> +++
May Day will be beautifully disruptive. As we shut down the privatized city of capital, we will open new public spaces that are empowering and inspiring. These spaces will be full of art. Everyone who leaves their house on May 1st should encounter some form of art. The strike will be an exercise in radical imagination informed by dreams of beloved community and histories of resistance. It will draw upon and reinvent the creative tactics of earlier struggles for freedom, equality, and justice from across the world. We will continuously add and multiply our collective creativity so that every act of defiance also demonstrates the possibility of another world beyond neoliberalism.
Join us at the Arts Assembly, where we will discuss the plans for May 1st, and provide breakout groups and networking so you can brainstorm and connect with artists, performers, volunteers, and resources for your project.
https://www.facebook.com/events/321765637872705/
May Day will be beautifully disruptive. As we shut down the privatized city of capital, we will open new public spaces that are empowering and inspiring. The strike will be an exercise in radical imagination informed by dreams of beloved community and histories of militant resistance. It will draw upon and reinvent the creative tactics of earlier struggles for freedom, equality, and justice from across the world. We will continuously add and multiply our collective creativity so that every act of defiance also demonstrates the possibility of another world beyond neoliberalism.
When we withdraw from work, let’s not just stay home or go shopping. Imagine May Day and its build-up as a Spring celebration of the arts, a people’s jubilee of the cultural commons. Everyone will be invited to the party: the kids and the elders, the singers and the dancers, the clowns and the monsters. Let’s go out into to the streets, parks, and lots to reclaim our city. Let’s march, converge, and assemble with our friends and families, communities and allies. Let’s make some art, pitch some tents, plant some seeds… and see what grows for the Summer and beyond
For the Occupy Wall Street General Strike on May Day, by Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt.
(via maydaynyc)
Banners, banners, everywhere. Spread the word.
DROWN OUT CAPITAL WITH A CHORUS: “We’re trying to confuse them with our loveliness.”
Organizing for Occupation has launched a multi-pronged defense for people facing eviction. Here, they disrupt a foreclosure auction with three waves of peaceful choir song, and close with a promise to defend each and every home that is auctioned off. By promising speculators and banks that all the foreclosures come with a defense team, they add an economic tax to foreclosures, encouraging banks to deal with homeowners. By filling the auction with song, they add a moral tax, encouraging speculators to aspire to something more powerful than profit.
Where else can we drown the din of transactional living with the music of a higher calling?
SILKS FROM THE SKY: “When I fly, people forget everything they knew about impossible.” aerialist Seanna Sharpe defied death and physics to bring a beautiful, inspiring performance to the otherwise routine daily commute. creative disruption involves showing people something they never could have dreamed, in a place they never thought to look: their daily lives. bring the show to where they are; inspire them to reimagine what is possible.
GUERILLA PROJECTIONS: the city is brimming with cold, blank surfaces. new technology opens great expanses of untouched canvas, awaiting the warmth of your brushstrokes. Read the inspiring story of the Occupy Wall Street “bat signal”.
PUBLIC POETRY: poems, often a solitary experience, take on new life when read and performed out loud in public, especially when amplified via the people’s microphone. Philip Glass, working with Occupy Musems, demonstrated the transformative power of the closing lines to his opera “Satyagraha” when delivered by dozens of voices speaking as one.
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra is the living, breathing, brass-tooting and drum-drumming embodiment of creative disruption. Every aspect of their existence is geared around bringing beautiful polyrhythmic exuberance to break up the monotonous corners of urban life. RMO will be joining us on May 1st, but they can’t cover every corner all at once. Take your music to the streets, and help set the soundtrack for a new beginning.
On Feb 9th, 2012, Merrill Garbus (aka tUnE-YarDs) took her music to the streets, Occupying Columbus Circle with something far more tuneful than the sounds of commerce, inspiring passersby to re-imagine both that space and the spaces in which they live their lives:
I will speak when I feel like speaking. I will be loud when I need to be loud. I will be heard when I need to be heard. I will not let a word like ‘Occupy’ scare me or make me feel boxed in!
Someone, somehow, reclaimed the Fox News ticker long enough to use it to spread some important truths, for once.
MASSIVE STREET THEATER: Occupy Broadway offered twenty four hours of free performances in Times Square. Can we do this in every public park, plaza, thoroughfare and intersection in New York — at the same time?
