Zach Seal

As the Oakland Occupy encampment made international headlines after being evicted by police during the early morning of Oct. 25 and reinstated two days later, an image emerged apart from all the tear gas and violence: the fence around Frank Ogawa plaza, neatly stacked like a deck of cards, four levels high, that protesters had made it into an art installation.

According to Justin Hoover, curator and gallery director of San Francisco-based SOMArts, these are the kinds of actions that define the Occupy movement.

“They used the barricades to make a sculpture,” said Hoover, “They stripped the object, recontextualized it.”

To Hoover and other employees at local arts organizations, the Occupy movement provides a unique opportunity to engage with the public in a number of ways.

For instance, in addition to efforts from within Occupy SF and Occupy Oakland to get artists involve (such as the Occupy SF performance series), three local groups — the California Shakespeare Theater, Intersection for the Arts, and theater ensemble Campo Santo — are beginning a collaboration called The Triangle Lab with Occupy-themed work.

The triumvirate put a call out via Facebook and Twitter about a week ago asking people to answer one of three questions: “What would the world look like if it belonged to the 99%?”, “Whose story do you most want to share?”, and “What would you like to see the crowd chanting?”.

People can upload video to the Triangle Lab's Facebook page, tweet at them, email or leave phone messages. The group then plans to turn the responses into a string of short performances, from dances to plays. This is the fledgling groups first project, and they'll make their inaugral public appearance at the General Strike at Oakland in the ampitheater in Frank Ogawa Plaza. (The General Strike performance stage is crowded: even a project with three well-established organizations got only a 15-minute window.)

“Usually when you do a play on current events, those events aren’t current anymore when you put it on,” said Rebecca Novick,  Partnership Project Director of the California Shakespeare Theater. “We’re trying to speed that up. Not just a little, but a lot.”

SomArts is taking a similar tact, asking artists over Twitter what kinds of projects they had initiated in response to the Occupy protests. Responses have ranged from portrait series of protesters to a performance piece called “Occupy My Hole” to a pair of artists who are literally burning money. On Oct. 28, they put out a formal call for work for an Occupy-themed art show.

The show will debut in March and April of 2012 as part of a show that has been two years in the making: "I Am Crime", a compendium of work that explores legal issues and artmaking.

“Public protests are reappropriating city spaces, “ said Hoover, who worked as an image researcher for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Global Peace before he arrived at SOMArts, “It’s illegal but it’s expressing the angst, zeitgeist, and discontent. There is a true community developing here, that we want to nurture on the community level.”