Debtors' Vision

How a group of Occupiers pushed Biden to embrace student debt relief

- By Hannah Levintova

AS A 28-YEAR-OLD art student, Thomas Gokey convinced the Federal Reserve to give him bags of shredded currency worth $49,983, the exact amount of his ballooning student loan debt. He pulped the scraps, turned the paste into four enormous sheets of paper, and began offering piecemeal sales-$4.22 a square inch.

In 2011, when the artwork was accepted in an annual competition-the American Idol of art, as Gokey describes it-that had been founded by the son of billionaire heir (and future Education Secretary) Betsy DeVos, he saw another shot at paying off the debt. Buyers had been scarce, but his project sparked conversations with other debtors. Anthropologist David Graeber had just published his opus on the topic; Gokey found it a secret decoder ring unveiling how debt enshrined divides of gender, race, and class.

The week of the contest, Gokey weighed joining an upcoming protest against economic inequality that he'd heard was planned for a small park near Wall Street. But he trekked off to Michigan for the competition, and quickly regretted it. I was still thinking of this as an individual problem, he says. Instead of joining the occupation from day one, like I should have done, I went to Betsy DeVos' art fair and tried to sell my debt.

His artwork, Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper, failed to win prizes or garner enough sales to make any real dent in Gokey's debt. Within days, he and his sleeping bag were on a Greyhound bound for the Occupy Wall Street uprising.