In 2011, artist Molly Crabapple was hosting Occupy Wall Street activists and journalists in her New York apartment and traveling the world to sites of unrest and revolution. In 2012, she was being arrested for returning to Zucotti Park. In 2013 she returns to the scene again with Shell Game, a series of nine 4-foot by 6-foot allegorical paintings to commemorate the chaos of a year of revolution, to be shown at New York's Smart Clothes Gallery starting April 14.

All told, the pieces cover Goldman Sachs, Anonymous, the health insurance crisis, the British anti-cuts protests, the American debt crisis, the Tunisian revolution, the anti-austerity protests in Greece, the M15 movement in Spain and Occupy Wall Street.

Wired and Molly Crabapple sat down for a conversation about how her Occupy experience shaped this latest series.

Wired: You describe Shell Game as a love letter to 2011. When I read that, my first thought was, "wasn't 2011 kind of an awful year?"

Molly Crabapple: I disagree. Yes, it was awful, but it was also magic. It was the magic of people speaking to each other, waking up, helping each other. For every person beaten up, everyone arrested, it was also a year of fierce aliveness.

In 2011 people around the world broke consensus with power. They sat down in the main squares of their cities – Tahrir, Syntagma, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti – and declared that the old machines were defunct. By 2012, the rebellions were partially crushed, or had mutated in ways their initial participants could never have imagined. It was a ferociously urgent year. Things, for the first time in a long time, felt like they might change – that a new world itself might be at the end of a street demonstration.

Occupy Wall Street happened outside my window. I was initially skeptical, but was quickly won over by the dedication of the occupiers in the face of a brutal, militarized police force. I tried to help however I could. I donated tarps and clothes, sold my prints to raise money, and sketched the occupiers. I turned my loft into a pressroom. Reporters from all over the world charged their laptops and drank my scotch. I'd draw graphics feverishly, give them to an occupier friend, and they'd turn up at street demos two hours later. My May Day General Strike poster ended up wheat-pasted on buildings around the world.

I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. Shell Game is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year. It's art that uses some of the techniques of journalism (I interviewed activists from all over the world), to make giant, subjective, old-school allegorical paintings.

Wired: What was it like to go from the high speed sketching of being in the moment and then returning to it a year later for these larger more contemplative pieces?

Crabapple: Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that. When I started Shell Game, I was painting very recent events. Now, I'm making these sort of votives to the past. It's a process that's nostalgic and a bit sad as much as it is joyful.

The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.Wired: As a document or votive, Shell Game's existence as nine large unique paintings – many already sold to collectors – interests me. Your protest art was copied and reproduced and used all over, and your sketches for Discordia were made infinitely copiable in ebook form. But Shell Game will be nine scattered shrines.

Crabapple: No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more. But you bring up a good point. The Communist party used to consider easel painting bourgeois, and murals the peoples' art, because easel paintings could only have one owner. But now murals are the far more bourgeois thing, since you have to be able to travel to visit them to really "get" them. Diego Rivera doesn't translate well on Tumblr. The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.

Wired: You said that by 2012 the rebellions had been crushed or mutated. Did you already feel like things had gotten that way as Shell Game's process was starting?

Crabapple: I started the Shell Game paintings last February. Zuccotti had already been cleared, but many people, myself included, thought that May Day would bring a magic resurrection of Occupy. It felt like a temporary setback. Greece was seeing the rise of the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. In London, UK Uncut protesters were getting slapped with harsh jail sentences. But the events were far fresher in the world's mind.

Wired: I keep thinking about the passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Thompson is eulogizing San Francisco's summer of love. "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Many people still agree that the old machine is broken. But it seems like the efforts of 2011 didn't work out. Are these the kinds of things you struggle with in your art?

Crabapple: I'm not sure I agree with you when you say "didn't work out." If one asks "did 2011 destroy the kleptocracy and inaugurate a utopia?" then of course the answer is no. But I think 2011 politicized huge swathes of people. In the US it taught the comfortable classes about the nasty side of the criminal justice system. It revitalized protest.

But, as an artist, I have a sort of privilege that an activist does not. An activist has to plan, to think of what happens next. As an artist, I can just seize things, chronicle, attempt to set bits of the past down, to give them shape and beauty, and see how that affects the present. Shell Game isn't a policy prescription. It's not a manifesto – unless that manifesto is something that says "be engaged in the world."

Wired: And: "Remember this happened?"

Crabapple: Yes. That. This was important. Once, a member of Anonymous was sitting in my studio. He looked at my painting The Hivemind and said "I look at this and think it might have been worth it." I try not to be grandiosese about the purpose of art. But maybe art and action, maybe, possibly, they can justify each other.

Wired: What do you mean when you say you used journalistic techniques to research each painting?

Crabapple: Each piece is immensely researched. I read a lot, of course. I interviewed countless activists, journalists, hackers, and participants. I travelled to Greece, London and Spain for research. It's a hard balance to strike – combining in a piece real events that people have bled and suffered for, and one's own massively subjective experience of those events. Whether or not I got each painting right, I tried.

Wired: Do you feel tensions or conflict between your roles as a protestor, journalist, and artists? Or do they fit together neatly?

Crabapple: Artists are the most lucky little foo-foos in the world. We've spent a century excusing every possible hypocrisy and depravity with "But I'm an artist!" A commitment to tell the truth above all else is often challenged when the truth is that your side is behaving badly. I think the best political art comes not out of movements, but out of individual humans, aligned with movements, that have kept their own sympathies, their irreverence, their curiosesity, their critical brains.

The Shell Game opens to the public Sunday, April 14th from 7-10pm. Smart Clothes Gallery, 154 Stanton Street, NYC.

All images courtesy Molly Crabapple except where noted.