The Brooklyn Rail

How many times have we rushed past the small non-commercial Hudson Guild Gallery, in a public housing project in Chelsea, on our way to some big-bucks exhibition? It now has a show on the theme of homelessness and housing, with works by well-known conceptual as well as unknown artists. If that sounds like something very good for somebody else to see, I have found it more critically stimulating than one might suppose.

The Hudson Guild itself (nothing to do with glitzoid Hudson Yards) is something like a 129-year old free-form settlement house, where normally amateur art is pursued as a social-service activity. Then again, this isn’t just another neighborhood, art-wise. Here, under Director of Arts Jim Furlong, the curators Maureen Connor, Jason Leggett, Tommy Mintz, Robert Robinson, and Midori Yamamora filled the modest space with works by Willie Baronet, Michael Corris, Elena Grachev, Martha Rosler, Hope Sandrow, Vicky Virgin, Sachigusa Yasuda, plus the collaboratives Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and CoHabitation Strategies.

This is by no means the first art exhibition to highlight homelessness, even apart from a more strictly architectural-design emphasis—in general, another ball of wax. Some such shows have had more or less the same seemingly non-institutional title. Intrinsic to this one was Martha Rosler’s largely photographic, but also constructed, mixed-media exhibit Timeline for Unhomeless NYC at Hudson Guild, dated 1989–present, including the ongoing history of her If You Lived Here…, an installation with an activist history of its own, shown in the USA and in many cities abroad. The title If You Lived Here… alludes to privileged US suburban living: billboards along highways or railroads saying, “If you lived here you would be home now,” but here applied ironically to those living on the street. Before, Rosler emphasized the problem (in historical extension of the slum photography of Thomas Annan and Jacob Riis); now there seems more of a thrust to solve it.

Large-looming as well as central to the overall concept here is We Are All Homeless (2022), attributed to Willie Baronet as, so to speak, its authorly collector-in-charge. It displays many inscriptional drawings made by homeless panhandlers on rectangular sides of corrugated boxes. The most frequent word, by far, is “help,” and the next is “hungry.” Individual subtleties have personally formal as well as expressively general interest—including the impulse, as emotionally constrained by the situation, to force a joke. If this weren’t an art gallery it might almost be cruel to be so detached, but I was drawn to a vertical piece using lowercase “l’s” in a stack of three words, as on a button:

HElP
HElP
 ME.

The “I’s” are so arbitrary, since even people who confuse capitals and lower case write “L”—a wayward usage that might even satirize the current foolish design cliché of dotting upper-case “I’s.” It would be nice to know the name of the actual artist. (Baronet paid each artist, but perhaps with little time at a red light.)

I do have to say that in installing this piece it was a bad idea to put one of the few figurative examples dead center on the wall, with everything else framing it, as if, like the “Draw Me” image on an old matchbook, it qualified as innately superior to non-figurative form. On the other hand, sixteen other We Are All Homeless examples, all without images, have full-page color illustrations in Incident in the Street: A Workbook (2024), a nicely produced “zine”-style artists’ book by Baronet and Michael Corris that the visitor was welcome to take.

Some of the works are more confined to being purely graphic, even statistical, presentations of social conditions. Vicky Virgin, otherwise a choreographer, has worked for many years as a demographic analyst and researcher at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. Her People Sleeping in Municipal Homeless Shelters (1983–2023), called floor-bound graphic attention to the overarching social problem of the small but engrossing exhibition.

I was unable to see Miguel Robles-Donan and Cohabitation Strategies’ video Uneven Growth, 2014, but it testifies that New York actually has more vacant apartments than homeless people, though in the interests of gentrifying displacement the real estate racket doesn’t want us think about that. Robles-Donan has shown a similar project at the Museum of Modern Art.

The most aggressive form of people’s displacement is eviction, which is the subject of the activist Manon Vergerio and his Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, 2013–14, an interactive computer mapping effort that came to New York from the Bay Area in 2014. A large map of four of the five boroughs (no Staten Island) is disconcerting to peruse, especially when striking home for anyone who has endured the humiliation of eviction (if truth be told, I was once evicted by Columbia, and had to room in a friend’s house, with books and art stored in the garage of one of the present curators). Evictions have become appallingly widespread in our supposedly Democratic city. The piece has a color scale of different densities for different neighborhoods but no color legend, so that unfortunately one cannot assess the two categories between the most and the least.

Sachigusa Yasuda’s Upscale, Uplift (2020 and ongoing), is a textile reclamation project, essentially making rags into luxury crafted clothing. It is in line with a great Japanese tradition of arts of repair, including boro textiles, whether for utility, on the bodies of the poor, or else for aesthetic regard. But the present luxurious works have nothing to do with homelessness; and for the sake of social welfare, I can only contrast them with the fair-trade encouragement of native textile production in Guatemala by a certain LES artist, designer, and priest, Fr. Andrew O’Connor, of St Mary Grand, on Grand Street.

I do want to point out a problematic architectural detail: a photo of a groundplan. As a minor part of Rosler’s exhibit, it strikes me as suggesting how the very building where one stands might be “renovated” if not replaced. Here, however, as in many a postwar project in the city of New York, the buildings are set diagonally in a superblock, which young conservative architects no doubt tend to despise as a “socialistic” look, the trouble being the new plan wants to mess with just that. These now older complexes are angled in plan for good reason, to open up the available space. The new plan is an attempt to de-modernize New York public housing that was often better designed than most capitalist housing. Were it to go through, it would produce bland and acoustically resounding courtyards of the old Bronx type: a Trumpian attempt to reverse and normalize New York. Fortunately, that is hardly what Rosler, and Hudson Guild’s UnHomeless NYC, are up to.