Alex Schaefer's Banks on Fire: How a 2011 Painting Predicted Bitcoin's Anti-Bank Rebellion

Alex Schaefer’s Burning Banks: A 2011 Artwork That Foreshadowed Bitcoin’s Rise

Revolutions leave behind artifacts. In the summer of 2011, painter Alex Schaefer set up an easel on a Van Nuys, California, sidewalk and began depicting a Chase Bank branch across the street. In his mind, the building was engulfed in flames—black smoke rising over palm trees, the Chase logo barely visible through the heat.

Schaefer worked en plein air, following the Impressionists’ tradition, but his subject was the largest bank in America—three years after receiving a taxpayer-funded bailout. A passerby called the police. When the artwork sold on eBay for $25,200 to a German collector, Schaefer’s response was simple: he painted more.

From Street Protests to Bitcoin’s Origins

The artworks featured in Relics of a Revolution at Bitcoin 2026 trace a lineage of dissent connecting street-level protest to Bitcoin’s birth. This lineage includes:

• 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, met with songs and a flag suit by Afroman

Schaefer’s Banks on Fire paintings belong to this tradition, enriched by an art-historical pedigree that sharpens their critique. Critics have compared them to Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68), which depicted a cultural institution in flames and hung the painting back in the museum itself. Schaefer replaced the museum with a bank, the oil crisis with the bailout era, and moved the canvas from the studio to the sidewalk outside the building—a decision that drew LAPD scrutiny.

“Some might say the banks are the terrorists,” Schaefer told officers who questioned him, asking if he planned to act on his fiery imagery.

From Chalk Protests to Jail Time

In July 2012, Schaefer was arrested outside a downtown Chase branch for chalking the word “Crooks” next to the logo. He 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 work on the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy—before returning to painting and teaching fundamentals at ArtCenter. Like Mear One, he worked in downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood that became ground zero for a decade of American unrest:

• Occupy LA camped on City Hall’s lawn, just blocks from his studio.
• The 2012 chalk protests, which swept the country, had a flashpoint outside a downtown Chase branch.
• The area around 5th and San Julian remained a visible stress test for systems the bailouts were supposed to have fixed.

Schaefer’s Banks on Fire series didn’t just capture anger—it became a symbol of the era, linking art, protest, and the anti-establishment ethos that would later define Bitcoin.