Occupy movement cataloged in museum

City museum curators are hunting down and collecting homespun Occupy Wall Street protest signs -- from union posters and fliers to works of art -- to be archived for future generations.

"We have been collecting since day one,'' said Jean Ashton, library director of the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. "It is our duty to preserve original documents and material for future generations who want to know how people in New York absorbed this movement.''

Since September, tens of thousands have marched through lower Manhattan and Times Square, calling themselves the 99 percenters and protesting economic inequalities. The OSW movement triggered similar protests across other American cities and around the world.

Now, more than 300 pieces have been gathered and are being cataloged as OWS continues to unfold, said Ashton, who has received a flood of calls from people who want to donate their materials. OWS materials include collages made by children for school projects, buttons and protest signs that ask for affordable housing and jobs, and copies of the movement's newspaper.

"Fifty to 100 years from now, people will want to know how it started; who were these people? Were they educated? Not educated? What did they hope to accomplish?'' said Ashton, who hypothesized a historian's questions when investigating the significance of OWS.

Maybe one day the OWS material will be as prominent as the original Stamp Act document from England that is currently being shown in the museum's "Revolution" exhibit, which details political movements, she said.

Artist William West, 57, of Jamaica, Queens, envisions seeing his OSW painting, which he donated to the museum, grace its walls. West has a collection of 300 paintings in which he fused his digital photographs and then painted them with acrylic using a toothpick.

"It's my own surreal embossed expression," said West, whose paintings depict marches, protesters amid a tent-occupied Zuccotti Park and police clashes with the Trump Building as a backdrop.

"If you capture events with art, then people have a historical, pictorial interpretation that they can see and talk about," said West.

At the Museum of Jewish Heritage, senior curator Esther Brumberg adds another twist to OWS: "Occupy Judaism." Brumberg is building up a collection of flyers and protest signs from various Jewish groups that were OSW demonstrators. She even collected a Sukkah, which was used by protestors.

In ancient times, Jewish farmers gave thanks for their harvests by living in Sukkahs, an open roof hut that reminded them of nature's and material wealth's vulnerability, said Brumberg.

"Jewish activism has always been very much part of our heritage,'' she said, "from the civil rights movement to Jews protesting genocide in Darfur."

The OSW materials are being cataloged for the museum's online website.

"Is this a flash-in-the-pan movement, or will it have a lasting affect? We don't know because we don't have that hindsight,'' said Brumberg. "But we want to make sure we have this collection just in case."