7 March – 14 April, 2022
Opening March 9th 3-7pm (in person)
Overview
Kingsborough Art Museum (KAM) is pleased to present UnHomeless NYC, a group exhibition that brings together sixteen artists and artist groups who use participation, activism, and pedagogy as their media. Connecting students, artists, activists, academicians, and the public, the show offers a forum to consider and better understand NYC’s housing crisis and think about our future as the city emerges from the pandemic in Spring 2021.
Background
The exhibition holds particular importance for Kingsborough; based on the 2018 #RealCollege survey, out of the 22,000 CUNY students, 55% were housing insecure in the previous year, and 14% were homeless. UnHomeless NYC was initially conceived to challenge the stigma of homelessness. Through artworks that highlight research, statistics, and activism, the show will examine how the fundamental human right to housing has been eclipsed in this city and offering an opportunity to imagine a different future.
Artwork
The first work in the exhibition, Miguel Robels-Duran and Cohabitation Strategies’s (CohStra) twenty-four-minute documentary video, Uneven Growth (2014), convincingly explains how neoliberalism has affected land use and changed people’s relation to housing in New York City, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. The new landowners–the banks and hedge fund firms–manage their tenants as dots on a spreadsheet, treating homes as commodities. This section also introduces examples of CohStra’s transformative urban design that suggests alternative possibilities for the future of our city.
Across from CohStra stands the show’s centerpiece, a recreation of an installation from Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here . . . originally exhibited in 1989. Rosler, the long-time anti-homeless advocate and activist-artist, invites contemporary local activists to use her work as their headquarters, as other activists did in the work’s original installation. Another artwork in this section by critical urbanist Manon Vergerio is the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (est. 2014), which provides the opportunity to view eviction data on a city map while listening to the recordings of the evictees’ personal stories. BFAMFAPh.D. an artists’ collective that bases its work in radical pedagogy, will invite a group of KCC administrators and students to form a think tank with NYC housing activists that will seek solutions to the unique forms of housing and food insecurity that exist on campuses.
Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE workshop creates a portable inflatable shelter that galvanizes a do-it-yourself spirit and foregrounds marginalized voices for viewer participants. Bill Beirne’s Priority Seating (2017-) initiates change by asking gallery visitors to place the priority seating signs he created on public benches and other support structures to advocate for preferential seating for the homeless. Amplifying the messages of these seminal pieces, the artist William Baronet will display in the gallery, a selection of signs Baronet has been purchasing from homeless people for over three decades. Michael Corris will create a ‘zine, Incidents on the Street: A Workbook, based on the stories these signs reveal.
Canadian artist Dominique Paul’s Median Income Dress (2015) contains LED lights that make visible the city’s rezoning and gentrification. Connected to the colors of online census-based income maps, the dress changes to distinguish residents’ income levels as she walks through various parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and engages the passersby in conversation about the changes they were witnessing in their neighborhood. Income and related issues of race also echo in Dread Scott’s two photographs from the 2016 series entitled On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide. In this series, Scott places contemporary struggles for racial justice within the history of civil rights activism in the United States, pointing to the foundation of inequality and calling for institutional change.
Collaboration is a focus of the exhibition. Hope Sandrow and The Artists and Homeless Collaborative’s historical video, Making Art, Reclaiming Lives (1993), demonstrates the value of collective artmaking by documenting the creation of a mural by homeless women living at the NYC Park Avenue Shelter as they worked together with several New York artists. The show will also feature Sandrow’s Shelter News and Resumé project. The artist duo Susan Hoffman Fishman and Elena Kalman’s site-specific installation, Fragmented Home: Kingsborough (2021), provides visitors the opportunity to manifest their ideas of home to create and collectively build a structure made of black parachute cord and 6” x 24” pieces of corrugated cardboard. As part of an outreach effort beyond the campus, during the exhibition, the artist Nancy Hwang, in collaboration with chef Heidi Thomas, will host eight extraordinary dining experiences for eight homeless people each time, under Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (2021) at Madison Square Park. At-a-glance Huang’s work makes us contemplate the overlapping issues of homelessness and ecology.
UnHomeless NYC further proposes ecology and regenerative energy as alternative frames within which to reconsider the housing crisis. Considering the unique clothing needs of the homeless, Sachigusa Yasuda will work with fashion-design students and others to reimagine modes of production and distribution with her anti-capitalist clothing line, UpCycle, UpLift. By altering recycled clothes to suit the requirements of those who live on the street, Yasuda invites the public to envision alternative economic systems that are more equitable. Considering different models for habitation and community in the age of climate change, Bibi Calderaro of The Institute for Wishful Thinking (est. 2008) will pose the questions: “What’s home? Whose home?” by hosting walks to various sites on the Kingsborough Campus–Urban Farm, Beach, and other locations–to consider how various other life forms make their homes in the environments that surround us.
The artists Maureen Connor and Tommy Mintz, also of the Institute for Wishful Thinking, will create a slide show that presents details about the exhibition and its events on campus-wide information monitors. The works and events both in and outside the gallery encourage visitors and students to apply the knowledge and insights learned through the arts and humanities to reconsider how they think about the housing insecurity that exists both on campus and in other Brooklyn neighborhoods.
UnHomeless NYC is an experiment in community college teaching that connects the college with the local community.
Access
The exhibition will be in a hybrid form. The show and all events will be accessible through online after October 13th at: https://homelessnyc.commons.gc.cuny.edu/artists/
Urban Intervention
During the exhibition, there will be physical satellite events held in Manhattan and Queens.
COVID-19 Protocols
We will follow the CUNY Protocols for Spring 2021.
