No matter the time period, one thing that you can always be sure of is the growing disparity between the wealthy and poor. Diego Rivera’s mural, Frozen Assets and The Occupy Movement share a lot of similarities. Frozen Assets is composed of three distinct juxtaposed parts. At the top is the easily recognizable skyline of New York but the colors and overall atmosphere is bleak and dystopian. Moreover, numerous cranes are visible but construction seems to have halted. Countless people, who look more like nondescript shadows are crowded into a station platform. This theme continues on down, as a steel shelter makes up the middle piece of the mural. Several men, faceless and equally nondescript, resemble corpses as they sleep in mass with an ominous looking figure standing as guard.
Even today, Frozen Assets is a metaphor to the events of present day with the Occupy Movement. In the mural, the people are dwarfed by the very thing they helped create, since most the labor in industry comes from the masses but progress can’t continue without the workers, hence the “frozen” construction. This is similar to the We Are The 99% basis of the Occupy Movement, since they also make up the vast majority compared to the 1% of the wealthy and are the main cog in how society functions.
The shelter in the middle piece resembles the “shantytowns” during the Great Depression and the Occupy Movement correlates to this with the tents they set up in protest. The recent violence is akin to the Bonus Army Conflict of 1932, albeit on a smaller scale. The comparisons with the mural, Frozen Assets from 80 years ago and the present day Occupy Movement is quite telling in how society still has an ever growing gap between the rich and poor.
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