Occupy Museums (Arthur Polendo, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fischer, Tal Beery) presents Debtfair Bundle: artists affected by the Puerto Rican debt crisis, 2017. This project, first shown at the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2017, is here reconceived by the artists of Occupy Museums to focus on the Puerto Rican debt crisis and the art-related debt of artists on the island. This project features works by artists Yasmin Hernández, Sofía Maldonado, Celestino Junior Ortiz, Norma Vila Rivero, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Adrian Viajero Román, Melquiades Rosario-Sastre, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Jose Soto, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.

Debtfair is based around a single question we asked of artists and the cultural community at large: “how does your economic reality affect your art?” What we have found is that personal debt–from student loans to credit cards to mortgages–plays a major role in the lives artists can lead and, ultimately, in what their work looks like. In bringing this question into a luxury art museum like the Whitney, Debtfair connects the boom of the art market with the boom of the debt market as linked realities. By asking artists to speak openly about their economic realities we hope to open a conversation that is currently taboo, demystify the ways in which our debts are connected, and produce a new lens through which we can see how art is connected to the economic conditions in which it is produced. And, of course, economic conditions cannot be separated from social and political conditions just as personal debts cannot be separated from the collective debts that we as a society hold––national debt, colonial debt, debt to the original inhabitants of this land, and debt to the enslaved Africans who built this country.

One of the early decisions in designing Debtfair was that we would show the work not on the walls but inside the walls. For us, this represents a hidden yet pervasive reality that we seek to uncover. Within the cutout shape are artworks of 30 artists who joined Debtfair. The works are framed between the exposed wall studs. Above and below the artworks are gray boards which serve as placeholders for artworks and symbolize a continuation of so many more unnamed artists who are affected by debt, but whose actual artworks are not present.