Relics Of A Revolution, Part IV: The Bank Was Already Burning

Revolutions leave behind artifacts. In the summer of 2011, a painter named Alex Schaefer set up an easel on a sidewalk in Van Nuys, California, and began painting the Chase Bank branch across the street. In his mind, the building was on fire — flames pouring from the windows, black smoke rising over the palm trees, the Chase logo still legible through the heat. He worked en plein air, the way the Impressionists had worked the Seine and the hay fields, except the subject was a branch of the largest bank in America three years after it had been bailed out with public money. A passerby called the police. When the artwork sold on eBay for $25,200 to a German collector, Schaefer did the only logical thing and painted more.

The artworks gathered in Relics of a Revolution at Bitcoin 2026 trace a lineage of dissent that connects street-level protest to the birth of Bitcoin itself — a Tokyo sidewalk in the snow with Kolin Burges, a Los Angeles overpass under wheat paste with Mear One, a botched police raid in Ohio answered with songs and a flag suit with Afroman. Schaefer’s Banks on Fire paintings belong to that same lineage, and they arrive with an art-historical pedigree that sharpens the point. Art critics have drawn the obvious line to Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68), the painting that put a cultural institution up in flames and hung it back on the museum’s own wall. Schaefer swapped the museum for the bank, the oil-crisis era for the bailout era, and took the painting out of the studio and onto the sidewalk in front of the building itself — a fact that earned him questioning by LAPD officers who wanted to know if he was a terrorist planning to follow through on his canvases. “Some might say the banks are the terrorists,” he told them. In July 2012 he was arrested outside a downtown Chase branch for chalking the word “Crooks” next to the logo, and spent twelve hours in jail on a misdemeanor vandalism charge.

Born in Los Angeles in 1969 and trained at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Schaefer spent eight years as a digital artist — including on the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy — before leaving the screen for the easel and returning to ArtCenter to teach the fundamentals of painting, drawing, and composition. Like Mear One, he spent years working out of downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood that functioned as ground zero for a decade of American unrest — Occupy LA camped on the lawn of City Hall a few blocks from his studio, the 2012 chalk protests that swept across the country had one of their flashpoints outside a downtown Chase branch, and the area around 5th and San Julian stayed a visible stress test of every system the bailouts were supposed to have fixed. 

The Banks on Fire series began in 2009, in the immediate wake of the financial collapse itself. “All the problems in America,” he has said, “to me seem to point to the same root problem. Which is: the money is bullshit.” The Bitcoin community found him quickly, and for obvious reasons. The Genesis Block’s embedded Times headline — “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” — is the same diagnosis in text that Schaefer was making in oil, on the sidewalk, while the building still stood.

I sat down with Alex Schaefer ahead of his panel at Bitcoin 2026 to talk about plein air protest, the 2008 crash, the architecture of bailouts, and what it means to paint a building on fire while the building is still there.

BMAG: Alex, you started the Banks on Fire series in 2009 — not in a studio, but on the sidewalk, en plein air, in front of the actual buildings. For people encountering this work for the first time, can you set the scene? What was happening in the country when you first set up an easel across the street from a Chase branch, and what made the sidewalk the right place to paint it?

Alex: In 2009 I had been (and continue to enjoy) “plein air” painting which means working on location outdoors directly from life; it’s very much associated with the French Impressionists and it’s a very enjoyable thing to do. Since I was living in LA at the time, my favorite motif to paint was urban landscape and I was often set up with an easel and art supplies on the sidewalk so I was used to making art in public. Also in 2009 I was starting to really pay attention to financial news and began a learning process about it that continues to this day. At the time I slowly began to think that the 2008 FiNaNciAL cRiSiS!!1! and subsequent trillion dollar bailouts were not what we were made to believe. Add to this a friend telling me about a show called the Keiser Report. Now Max and Stacy, along with all sorts of news and information on YouTube, are educating me with wit and insight about what was exactly happening. I could only draw one conclusion: This was a crime spree and not only were the perpetrators getting away with it, they were getting paid. Outrageous. AntiAmerican, AntiCapitalist, Anti-Law and Order. A couple years later and duly radicalized, I was seeking a way to express my outrage. I was plein air painting a lot, especially with a friend who lived in Van Nuys. In his neighborhood I saw this Chase Bank that used to be a Washington Mutual that used to be a Home Savings and Loan and it was this beautiful Millard Sheets designed mid-century modern building. That was the eye chocolate falling into the peanut butter of my mind: I am going to paint en plein air this Chase bank like the roof is on fire. One day later I took the following photo:

BMAG: There’s an art-historical line that keeps getting drawn between your work and Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire — a painting that set a cultural institution alight and then hung back on the walls of the institution itself. You swapped the museum for the bank, the oil-crisis era for the bailout era, and took the work out of the studio and onto the sidewalk. When you look at that lineage, do you see yourself as extending a conversation Ruscha started, or diagnosing something he couldn’t have seen yet in the 1960s — the specific rot of a financial system that now runs the culture that used to run it? Is it Deja Vu all over again with the current Middle East situation? 

Alex: I think something that the two paintings share is they were born out of a sense of outrage. But different in that one is about financial terrorism and the other about lack of institutional representation for artists. Ruscha painted his piece from 1965 to 1968, which interestingly was when the French were putting tremendous pressure on the US dollar by swapping their paper dollars for actual gold, which at the time was an incredible bargain in a rigged market. Everyone was feeling the inflation, I’m sure even Ed Ruscha, from stupid foreign and domestic policy government spending, the French knew why (Vietnam), and a couple years later Nixon closed the gold window, letting loose wanton money creation on a scale never imagined. Ironically this turned out to be a benefit for the “Capital A” Art Market via the CIA flooding contemporary American Art auction houses with cash promoting this idea of American Exceptionalism; i.e., not only did America beat you commies to the Moon, our art is better too (read: more expensive). 1973 was the famous Bob Scull auction of his contemporary art collection that broke all price records at the time. The game was on.

BMAG: The LAPD questioned you as a possible terror suspect while you were painting, and in 2012 you were arrested for chalking the word “Crooks” next to a Chase logo — twelve hours in jail on a misdemeanor vandalism charge. Mear was censored and nearly cancelled. Kolin was told by Mt. Gox that if he kept protesting everyone would lose their bitcoin. Afroman had seven deputies with assault rifles kick in his door. What did being treated as a threat by the state teach you about the artwork itself — and about what the institutions you were painting were actually afraid of?

Alex: The powers that be, the institutions, want the public to be mad at each other. Picture those hierarchy pyramid illustrations and on one level is “The Public” and above them on the pyramid are layers like Police, the Justice System, Politicians, C-Suite Executives, Banks, Central Banks, Satan etc. Every layer above The Public over centuries has created ways to exert power over Us, for all sorts of reasons but mainly because they are afraid of Us directing the sum of all our anger at the aforementioned upper layers. They use their favorite trick and divide The Public into different factions with each side getting their own custom grievances and scapegoats. Then the mainstream media does its job of winding people up on both sides and voila: anger and outrage side to side and Us toward each other, but none of that directed above. As soon as someone in The Public layer starts calling out an injustice in an upper layer, troubles will come to them. Everyone you mentioned, Mear, Kolin, Afroman, 1st Amendment auditors, tax protestors etc., all know this. My experience with this ongoing Burning Banks series has taught me many things over the years about art, the art world, the financial world, Truth, Justice, the American Way etc. Great things, scary things, profound things… But the first thing it taught me is the power of spectacle and that when the spirit moves you powerfully to do something, even though it might seem a little weird or scary you gotta go with it.

BMAG: You’ve said, plainly, that “the money is bullshit” — that all the disconnected problems in America point back to the same root. How did you arrive at that diagnosis, and when you first encountered bitcoin, did it feel like confirmation of something you’d already been painting, or like a different kind of answer to the same question?

Alex: I think I would more accurately say that “fiat” money aka currency aka the federal reserve note, is bullshit. Fiat currency was invented centuries ago to wage war and the US PetroDollar is no different. Endless war, wars of aggression, the War on drugs, the War on cancer… you name it there’s a war going on either for or against it and at the end of the day it’s all funded by the Federal Reserve. Every terrible idea put forth by our so-called leaders gets funded. It’s true: “The love of money is the root of all evil’ but in the case of the US Dollar, it’s actually the money itself not just the love of it. The way that it’s created out of thin air and the implications of that fundamentally shows nothing but utter disregard and disrespect for the value of human life and human labor. Despite that, civilization needs “money”. Good money that is. The social construct that is money is older than capitalism, it’s frankly as old as society itself and is the means for complex and specialized societies to form, grow and flourish. For millennia that function was fulfilled by gold and silver, they possess the classical qualities of Sound Money in that they are scarce, fungible, transportable, divisible, durable, a unit of measurement and medium for exchange. Once you accept this as a fact, then you learn about bitcoin, it slowly then suddenly dawns on a person that it is the greatest form that the concept of Money has ever taken. And then you start to really think that if we can fix the money, we truly can fix the world! Defund Evil!

BMAG: This exhibition is called Relics of a Revolution, and it puts your work in conversation with Kolin’s Mt. Gox protest sign, Mear’s Occupy-era murals and wheatpaste protest posters, and Afroman’s flag suit — alongside an original copy of The Times from January 3, 2009, the newspaper Satoshi encoded into the Genesis Block. The dollar bill works you’re showing here take a different route to the same thesis. What do you want someone walking through this exhibition to take away — especially someone who knows bitcoin as a price ticker but has never thought of it as the continuation of a fight that artists, cypherpunks, and protestors have been in for decades?

Alex: Honestly, as with all my paintings, I want people to be visually struck by something first and foremost… Whether it’s the paint surface, the color, the contrast, the effect of light, the imagery, just be interesting to the eyes first, then the mind. I find the low resolution pixelated quality of the Devaluation series pieces to be fascinating to look at. There is an interesting interplay happening between the eye and mind of the viewer; the painting is complete but it is also “completed” in the viewer’s mind. The viewer gives more to the image by way of their imagination than is actually visually imparted by the painting itself. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” Then one might question the subject matter and how it’s depicted with the concept of Devaluation. At what point can the painting become so pixelated that you can’t even make it out for what it is anymore? Just like at what point can the Dollar become so watered down and extended and pretended that it entirely loses its “Tinkerbell Effect” and ceases to perform it’s crucial function around the World. We may find out.

This is Part IV of the Relics of a Revolution interview series accompanying the Relics of a Revolution exhibition. Part I features Kolin Burges, Part II Mear One, Part III Afroman. 

Fix the money. Fix the world.

Clean and minimal: Schaefer will exhibit artwork on view at Bitcoin 2026, April 27–29, at The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, and will appear on a speaking panel moderated by Dennis Koch titled “Looking at Bitcoin Art Through a Protest Lens” alongside Kolin Burges and Mear One. Bid on Schaefer’s work HERE. 

The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference. Since 2019, the BMAG conference art gallery has facilitated more than 120 BTC in art and collectible sales. Learn more about BMAG at museum.b.tc. Follow BMAG on twitter @BMAG_HQ.

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