The day finally arrived!

The Muster was amazing, with approximately 125 artist participants, over 50 full-on campsite installations and nearly 2000 spectators.

A small sampling of PICTURES have been posted to this site, although literally thousands were taken. A book is already in the works, so in the months ahead I will be collecting images as well as stories from the Muster.

Thank you to all who participated and attended. We heard from the Governors Island folks that it was the most well-attended event to be held on the island, with ferries filled to capacity the entire day.

The big question: Will there be a Muster 2006?

Come One! Come All!

It is time to MUSTER!

Ginger Brooks Takahashi, who will be fighting for Peace through Participation, sent in this photo of a sign she spotted while taking a boat from Victoria, British Columbia to Port Angeles, Washington last Sunday. Glad to know they are mustering out there, too!

By the way, at the Muster you will meet not only people from the five boroughs, but also mustering regiments from upstate New York and New Jersey, from San Francisco and Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Virginia, and France!

Eliza Jane Curtis is fighting for Colors. Her Muster uniform and campsite will be remarkably colorful, evoking connotations of festivity and celebration, as well as a diversity of causes, aesthetic preferences, and political affiliations. At her tent, Eliza will provide visitors with colorful materials (paper, paint chips and fabric swatches) so you can declare or display your own "colors" at the Muster.

As of the time of this post, she has built an arsenal of flags -- 103 and counting...

"What am I fighting for?" asks Gayle Brown. "I am fighting for understanding the causes of my fighting. I'm fighting for clarity and to ultimately liberate myself from the fight." Focusing on the causes of her interior struggles, she states, "My strategy for winning this battle is to start by making a fearless and searching moral inventory of myself."

At the Muster, Gayle will present a multi-layered installation on stilts with sculptural symbolism representing her past battles and resentments, as well as her willingness to forgive and move on.

Artist Melissa Brown is leading her troops (fellow SlowJams band members Michael Williams and Andy Hershey) in a fight to represent "the new school guerrilla freestyle," interpreting the Civil War aesthetic in terms of contemporary music and hip-hop style. At the Muster, they will be taking familiar music and translating it into battle raps and chants.

Their tent will be built upon the trampoline shown here, providing an "R and R" location for the recreation and amusement of soldiers.

William Bryan Purcell is fighting for "the just representation of the female intentions in a culture obsessed in the control of masculine indoctrination." His call to arms lies in the color pink, associated, he writes, "with all things sweet and girly."

Bryan is working with a seamstress to create his own, all-pink wool Civil War infantry uniform. Inside his tent, he will provide "activities, services, and situations celebrating things typically associated with being feminine", i.e. hair brushing and braiding, nail painting with pink nail polish, and talking about feelings and relationships. His encampment aims to provide "a safe and discrete place of refuge from the battlefield," for people of any gender.

Shabd Simon-Alexander is camp leader for Savior Scraps, a collaborative encampment composed of objects scavenged from friends, family, and strangers. Their aim is to provide a tangible exchange of materials at the Muster, establishing a continuous community dialogue through crafting.

This is a photo of Shabd and her mother, "quilting Our american flag."

Moms are invited to the Muster! Mine will be there.

Klara Hobza will be a messenger: receiving, encoding, transporting, and deciphering messages at the Muster. Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the famous Morse code, envisioned that his invention would prevent the Civil War. But, writes Klara, "He forgot about site-specificity and was proven wrong. I think I can suggest better methods."

Muster enlistee Patrick Meagher proclaims, "The Visual War is on to another level...more and more advertising surfaces and techniques creep into our cities and invade our visual and unconscious realms! People arm yourselves with expressive, affirming media munitions, firing straight from computer cannons!"

Patrick designed this logo specially for the Muster.

At the Muster, Albert Pedulla will be making a call for Universal Aesthetic Suffrage. He writes, "In order to form a more democratic aesthetic , it is right and good that every man, woman, and child should be guaranteed the RIGHT TO PAINT. To this end I propose that two field tents of my design be erected on the site of the Muster to serve as Democratic Painting Booths, thus ensuring the right of every citizen to cast their brushstroke for the image and/or abstraction of their choice."

To venerate the occasion, Albert will be selling official commemorative bottles of "Snake brand Oil Paints of Democracy" for a modest fee of one U.S. dollar.

Sam Gordon is fighting for Solidarity and Yoga, which literally means Union. He says, "I will dress as Ganesh, the Indian deity with an elephant's head and a boy's body (the elephant as symbol doubled through its use by the Republican party)." Like the attempt to levitate the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, he will invite spectators to enter his encampment and meditate for five minutes on a cause of their choice.

As a member of the Ether Brigade For Anti-Apocalyptic Mediation, Nicole Eisenman is fighting for rigorous communication, "to crush the isolation of psychic captivity." Teaming up with artist A.L. Steiner, she will present a Media Communications Tent, "for the purpose of exclamatory and investigative reflections, to include a soapbox, confessional, and picture desk."