The Occupiers, three years later: Where are they now?
Randy LoBasso, Philadelphia Weekly, October 8, 2014
Briana Barton got a call the day before she was set to head to New York in fall 2011. It was her roommate, Sean. It sounded important.
The valedictorian of her Moore College of Art and Design’s graduating class just five months earlier, Barton knew she wanted to settle in Philadelphia, but was feeling lost. After leaving the small, elite, Center City college with a fine arts degree, she had yet to find a job. Moreover, she was becoming dismayed by the very idea of using art in the service of capitalism: “I just didn’t want anything to do with most of the art world,” she says today. “Art is something that’s pretty sacred, one of the most beautiful things about being human. To see it used to persuade people—that’s evil to me.”
But everything was about to change. Inspired by New York’s Occupy Wall Street protest, thousands of people around the country had begun pitching tents in the name of fighting corporate capitalism.
