Revolutions go away behind artifacts — not all the time weapons or flags, however the quieter objects that carried a message earlier than anybody knew how far it could journey. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard signal held up within the snow exterior a Tokyo workplace constructing. A newspaper headline, pulled from the entrance web page of The Occasions of London and encoded completely into a bit of software program that may go on to problem the structure of worldwide finance.
The works gathered in Relics of a Revolution on the Bitcoin 2026 Convention in Las Vegas hint a particular lineage of dissent — one which connects street-level protest to the start of Bitcoin itself. Mear One (b. 1971, Santa Cruz, CA) has spent practically 4 many years utilizing the partitions of Los Angeles as a medium for political and financial confrontation. He pioneered the Melrose graffiti artwork motion within the late Eighties, was the primary graffiti artist to exhibit on the 01 Gallery on Melrose and at 33 1/3 Gallery in Silverlake — the place Banksy would later debut his first North American present — and in 2004 joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour, a nationwide sequence of anti-war avenue artwork interventions throughout the Bush administration. His work was a part of the landmark Artwork within the Streets exhibition on the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Artwork in 2011 and resides within the everlasting collections of the Laguna Artwork Museum amongst others. From anti-Gulf Warfare broadsides within the early Nineties via the Occupy Wall Avenue encampments of 2011, Mear One has been making work that insists the foundation drawback is the system itself — not the politicians or the insurance policies, however the underlying structure of cash and energy.
I sat down with Mear One forward of his panel at Bitcoin 2026 to speak about protest, artwork, damaged techniques, and why the revolution just isn’t over, or easy methods to exit a loop.
BMAG: Mear One, you began writing on partitions in Los Angeles within the mid-Eighties, at a second when graffiti was nonetheless broadly criminalized and the concept of it coming into museum collections would have appeared far-off. By the early Nineties, you have been making large-scale political work — anti-Gulf Warfare broadsides, items confronting financial energy constructions head-on. What was driving you to make use of the road as a political medium at that time, and who have been you making an attempt to achieve?
Mear One: Graffiti is the voice of the dissatisfied soul, and again then it was a car to achieve the lots earlier than the web took off & social media ever existed. Whenever you illegally spray paint your concepts within the public realm it resonates with the urbanite caught in visitors, angers the town officers whose dilapidated partitions we scribe like a giant center finger to their failed insurance policies. Acutely aware artwork speaks to acutely aware folks, and the act of vandalism carries with it an vitality that helped instigate a motion which was missing. The streets have been our assembly floor, and getting away with it saved us all nameless, permissionless.
BMAG: There’s a phrase that circulates in bitcoin tradition — “all wars are banker’s wars.” The Genesis Block itself accommodates a newspaper headline a couple of financial institution bailout. Whenever you look again on the work you have been making throughout the Gulf Warfare period and later throughout Occupy Wall Avenue, how a lot of it feels prefer it was pointing towards the identical structural critique that bitcoin would ultimately encode into its protocol?
Mear One: Fairly actually, after I found bitcoin it instantly jogged my memory of the graffiti, hip hop, and punk rock tradition I grew up in, it mirrored the revolutionary requirements I used to be speaking via my artwork. I feel all of us need an ideology or motion that speaks to and gives an answer to the limitless new world order slave entice that so many have develop into accustomed to. And it seems the architects who created this present financial matrix are the identical builders of our jail colleges, creators of our bankers’ wars. Satoshi knew this. People don’t actually have world warfare points with each other, these points stem from financial and political energy struggles exterior of our basic human wishes like freedom, love, a non secular connection to a better objective. My objective as an artist is to all the time expertise freedom, to set myself free from the system, that is the idea of my artwork, philosophy and resistance.
BMAG: In 2004, you joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour — taking anti-war, anti-corporate avenue artwork throughout the nation throughout the Bush administration. That was 4 years earlier than the monetary collapse, and three years after 9/11 had already been used to justify unprecedented expansions of surveillance, navy spending, and government energy. What did that have educate you about utilizing artwork as a software for financial and political resistance, and the way did it form your considering when the crash really arrived?
Mear One: Be the Revolution with Robbie and Shepard was extra so an outlet to precise my angst and dismay of American politics on the time. Preventing wars for overseas assets to promote for revenue exacerbating this hierarchy of haves and have nots nonetheless weighs heavy on my philosophical coronary heart.
However when the monetary crash hit in 2008 my revolutionary lens shifted drastically, and for the primary time in my life I grew to become enthusiastic about studying how the system of cash really operates, what cash is, and looking for to articulate via my artwork a extra correct definition of the brand new world order culminating in my most controversial work so far False Income.
“You can’t dismantle the grasp’s home with the grasp’s instruments.” Subversive artwork, subliminal artwork, unlawful artwork, artwork that punches you within the intestine with info and satire utilizing a twig can, paint brush, wheat pastes, music, comedy, movie, no matter instruments are in your inventive equipment, artwork is the simplest strategy to create change. I feel nice artwork stands the check of time for its high quality of being considerably psychic, narrating the trigger earlier than the impact is broadly understood by the lots, earlier than it’s too late.
BMAG: Avenue artwork is ephemeral by nature — it will get buffed, painted over, torn down, rained on. A few of your protest works from the Occupy period and earlier have survived. What does it imply to you that objects made in that spirit of urgency — work created to be short-term — are actually being proven in a gallery context as historic artifacts?
Mear One: They’re nonetheless related, satirically, as a result of nothing’s modified! Similar circumstance, completely different puppets. These works level out a situation that’s ongoing inside our human story, and it’s vital as Bitcoiners to pay reminiscence to our previous struggles and the cures which we select to resolve them. On this spirit of urgency these Relics of Revolution are calling out for precisely that – the time for change is all the time now!
BMAG: You have been making anti-war avenue artwork throughout the first Gulf Warfare. Now, greater than thirty years later, we’re watching one other navy escalation within the Center East — this time with Iran. The equipment seems to be completely different, the justifications sound completely different, however the financial structure beneath it’s remarkably comparable. For a technology that got here of age watching 9/11 develop into the justification for twenty years of warfare after which watched the 2008 crash reveal that the monetary system underwriting all of it was itself a fraud — once you see this cycle repeating, does it really feel like affirmation of one thing you’ve been saying on partitions for many years, or does it really feel like failure — that the message didn’t land?
Mear One: Such as you mentioned, all wars are bankers wars. And for a whole bunch of years we’ve been fed a false narrative about who our enemy is. There’s a number of truths I’ve tried to level out via my artwork and it has made my life a lot tougher for it. I’ve been criticized, censored, practically cancelled, had my life threatened, labelled all kinds of heinous issues. However I resisted, I used to be unapologetic, and I proceed to do my work unfazed. Typically it looks like I’m standing on the road nook pointing up within the sky, screaming on the prime of my lungs in regards to the chemtrails, and everybody simply thinks I’m loopy – it’s all the time like that to start with – however persons are waking up. It’s not simple to do artwork that factors out what’s unsuitable with the system. However it’s additionally not simple to be trustworthy with your self and settle for the mediocre mundane pointless actuality that’s the social norm. The reward in doing that is to see a motion like bitcoin spawning and like-minded folks sharing the enjoyment and vigor for revolution.
BMAG: There’s an argument — and it runs deep in Bitcoin considering — that wars are usually not actually fought over ideology or territory however over financial management. That each main battle is finally about defending or resetting an financial order that advantages the folks waging it. Your work has been making that case visually for the reason that Nineties. How do you articulate that connection between warfare and cash to somebody who hasn’t considered it that manner?
Mear One: I create an allegory that consists of the primary elements, I’m challenged to current it in its most digestible kind; but that is difficult material so this problem causes me to incorporate subliminal psychedelic mythological archetypes and symbolism all coming collectively to help on this difficult narrative, not solely to create one thing visually compelling, however to offer the subject material a spotlight and a spot to develop into a dialogue amongst folks. Via narrative artwork you possibly can introduce concepts that folks battle with within the summary.
BMAG: The 2008 crash, the bailouts, Occupy, and now what seems to be like one other cycle of inflation, debt, and navy spending — do you see Bitcoin as the primary actual exit from that loop, or simply the newest try and construct one thing exterior a system that retains absorbing its opposition?
Mear One: I’m a non-dogmatic being by nature. Bitcoin to me is the primary wave in new expertise which may steer us away from the fiat slave system. However I’m not satisfied that it’s the be-all and end-all for our present predicament. As we observe Wall Avenue trying to hijack bitcoin all of the whereas in-fighting amongst inner ideologues rages on, all that noise obscures bitcoin’s authentic ethos. These are its issues which might be being labored out. I’m rather more a believer in innovation and I welcome many extra new innovations to enter our realm. I feel that the financial actuality must run its course although, and what ultimately follows I hope is a non secular revolution. I see bitcoin as a crowbar in an emergency break the glass state of affairs the place it’s crucial for the following iteration of the place we’re heading into the 2030s. I do imagine that’s in the direction of a state of final freedom the place the idea of cash itself will develop into out of date as we migrate nearer to rebuilding a brand new world.
BMAG: How did you first encounter Bitcoin, and was there a particular second the place it clicked for you as linked to the identical values and frustrations that had pushed your avenue observe for many years?
Mear One: Again in 2009 I ran right into a mathematician at a espresso store in my neighborhood, we struck up dialog over my artwork and he hipped me to bitcoin for the primary time. I by no means noticed myself as one who would make investments cash into cash, so it was simply an attention-grabbing concept at the back of my thoughts. As I deepened my training into what cash is thru Occupy and to the creation/fallout of my London mural in 2012, my path ultimately led my woman and I to our first bitcoin convention down in Mexico at Anarchapulco. We have been launched to a tribe of anarchists who shared comparable sentiments on politics and life-style. I had tens of millions of questions, everybody had solutions, and like a sponge I absorbed this information. I rocked two reside artwork items for the neighborhood, which I auctioned off. These collectors helped me arrange my first pockets (shout out EDGE) in addition to the transactions in trade for my proof-of-work. That’s when it clicked for me, after I earned my first cash.
BMAG: Your work is in a present known as Relics of a Revolution. Do you assume the revolution it’s referencing is over, nonetheless taking place, or one thing that hasn’t absolutely begun but?
Mear One: Revolution is a each day prevalence, it is likely one of the inevitable elements of life that you simply both participate in or it’s gonna take part of you. Revolution actually means a cycle that we expertise in numerous seasons throughout completely different cultures, time and house. There’s quite a lot of revolutions at present going down. What’s nice about bitcoin is it someway is ready to join and bridge to them as a result of finally it seeks what all of us need – freedom from the system.
BMAG: This exhibition is known as Relics of a Revolution, and it consists of your protest works alongside an authentic copy of The Occasions from January 3, 2009 — the newspaper whose headline Satoshi embedded within the Genesis Block. That newspaper is the second a prognosis grew to become a protocol — the second the frustration that Mear One had been portray on partitions and that Kolin would later keep it up an indication in Tokyo was encoded into one thing that might not be buffed, censored, or bailed out. Whenever you see your work displayed alongside that artifact, what would you like somebody strolling via this exhibition to remove — somebody who could know Bitcoin as a value ticker however doesn’t know the historical past of why it exists?
Mear One: Accumulate these artistic endeavors! And I don’t imply that facetiously. Each nice artwork motion had their Medicis, these whose energy and affect outlined the type & concepts of a technology. All of the works you see right here within the gallery is artwork denominated in bitcoin, created by artists whose works are impressed by the philosophical ideas underlying the best bitcoin art work of all of them, the Genesis Block. Like bitcoin, artwork is the best retailer of worth. However cultural preservation of those effective artwork property of freedom by completed artists requires the patronage of these with ardour for these aesthetic visions. At present we face WW3, financial destruction, commerce & agriculture collapse. Bitcoin cuts that circuit of struggling & punishment. Our final struggle is with the controllers of cash and their bullshit fiat establishments, rendering their scheme out of date and irrelevant.
That is Half II of a three-part interview sequence accompanying the Relics of a Revolution exhibition. Half I options Kolin Burges. Half III, that includes Afroman, is forthcoming.
Repair the cash. Repair the world.
Mear One can be portray reside within the BMAG artwork gallery all through Bitcoin 2026, April 27–29, at The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, and can seem on a talking panel moderated by Dennis Koch titled “ Bitcoin Artwork Via a Protest Lens.” A singular print by Mear One entitled The Magician is out there completely via BMAG. Preview Mear One’s historic protest works included within the Relics of a Revolution exhibition within the BMAG B26 public sale HERE.
The Bitcoin Museum & Artwork Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Convention. Since 2019, the BMAG convention artwork gallery has facilitated greater than 120 BTC in artwork and collectible gross sales. Study extra about BMAG at museum.b.tc. Comply with BMAG on twitter @BMAG_HQ. Bundle your Bitcoin 2026 cross with a keep at The Venetian and get your fourth night time free. Use code AFTERS for a free After Hours Move, or get your cross alone right here.
