No, the Occupy Wall Street protest — which has spread to cities from Boston to San Francisco — has not yet come to 06880’s Main Street.
However, that did not stop Derek Pell — a Westporter in the 1960s and ’70s — from resurrecting an “occupy”-related photo on his ZoomStreet “art, culture, photography and noir” blog.
Derek wrote:
In the spirit of the recent Occupy demonstrations spreading across the land, here’s a photo (my first) shot in 1969. It shows artist Miggs Burroughs demonstrating outside the Westport Arts Center, where his paintings had been excluded from the inaugural exhibition.
The image recently resurfaced in a documentary on WAC.
I’m also responsible for creating that crude sign.
Art indeed.
Derek’s been attracted to this sort of stuff all his life. According to Miggs, Derek — “using nothing more than a press pass from Fairpress” [a Westport weekly newspaper] — ended up in the front row of photographers at the Watergate hearings, and getting published in Rolling Stone, Newsweek and others.
Power to the painters. The people.
And the photographers.