Taking Stock

2021 | 50ft x 11ft | vinyl installation

Brookfield Projects - 1 Liberty Plaza | New York, NY

Taking Stock is a site-specific vinyl artwork, commissioned by Arts Brookfield, which aims a critical lens at the stock market’s historical and ongoing impact on the lives of New Yorkers and Americans writ large. It utilizes One Liberty Plaza's location in the heart of New York’s Financial District and across from Zucotti Park—the site that began the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement against income inequality which would give rise to the wider Occupy Movement across the US and world—as a site of critical reflection on wealth disparity in the US. 2021 is the 10 year anniversary of OWS, and we find ourselves amidst another financial crisis due to a global pandemic—in which poor and working class communities immeasurably suffer while the wealth of the world's billionaires rose by $5 trillion. Taking Stock begs the question: in the past decade what, if anything, has changed?

As right-wing rhetoric continues to capitalize on xenophobia and racism to misdirect conversations about the economy (and obfuscate rampant corporate monopolies and tax loopholes for the rich), poor white communities continue to vote against their own economic interests and the 99% remains politically polarized rather than mobilized under a common class struggle. This spectacular smokescreen of conservative rhetoric and propaganda is metaphorically echoed in the work’s sprawling maximalist patterning: the pattern incorporates motifs from US currency, data charts from the US stock market, Dutch East India Company logo (the first publicly traded company) and signatures from the Buttonwood Tree Agreement (the document that laid the groundwork for the New York Stock Exchange) which act to subvert a multitude of QR codes also embedded in the patterning. These QR codes link to articles about the legacy of OWS and the increasing income inequality in the US during the past decade. Additionally, the grid design that undergirds the pattern motifs is also periodically replaced by Morris code (a technology which was integral to the success of the early stock market) which reads: “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.