Street roots., July 10, 2009, Page 8, Image 8

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street roots
Education * Dialogue ♦ Independence
The eye
of the
beholder
From the Great Depression to modern day,
‘Hobos to Street People’ showcases artists'
interpretation o f poverty and homelessness
BY CAROL HARVEY
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
F 1 ^erry Chandler stood in the vaulted art
gallery. Her tiny 4 foot, 11 inch figure
JL was dwarfed by the colorful painting
of a Hispanic boy walking to school past a
rotten tomato splashed against graffiti oh a
wall, ordering ‘Homelèss Go Home.” He is
protected by four adults as he walks to a
schpol for homeless children. Artist Nili,
Yosha crafted the work after Norman
Rockwell’s illustration of guards escorting a
small black girl into a newly integrated Little
Rock school.
Terry tilted her head, peering at me with
a shy, sardonic smile. “When people say
t h i s ,’’"sE e o b s e r v e ^ “T h e y a r e 'd o in g i t to*be
mean.”
“It’s good that homeless people get to see
(this show) too. Then we can; tell you if it’s,
real or n o t”
“The best thing about this show is it
makes people think.” Her voice echoed
slightly, “I live it. It’s so red. All this is so
true.”
n April 2009,1 invited four formerly or '
curfently unhoused San Franciscans to
The California Historical Society, 678
Mission Street They viewed a collection of
paintings, prints, photographs and mixed
media pieces by more than 40 artiste
represented in an exhibition entitled “Hobos
to Street People: Artists’ Responses to
Homelessness from the New Deal to the
Present” The show began February 19 and
continues to August 15, 2009.
Charming, well-spoken Terry Chandler,
27, once slept in nearby Annie Alley next to
a Dumpster pictured in an exhibit photo.
After one night on the street restlessly
avoiding biting rate, Eric Robinson, 54, stays
in shelters or with friends. David Sutties,
I
•56, camped in the street with his wife after
.a corrupt residential hotel management
eviction. Travis,' 28, read John Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath just before he was forced
to leave home.
Curator Art Hazelwood reported positive
reactions to the show. Visitors’ occasional §
negative responses reflect a “demonization”
of homelessness' and homeless people by "
the press and social stereotyping.,
“People want to turn homeless people
into a kind of ‘other’ that they can dismiss,”
he said. “It’s easier to dismiss people if you
categorize them and accuse them of being
morally lax.”
Terry agreed. Her brown bangs §wung__
a d a m a n tly . “T h e n e w s p a j j e r t e lls p e o p lg ,'
things that aren’t true, and people believe ,
it.”
This false stereotype “is not something
new,” says Hazelwood. “One answer to
almost any complaint is to point to identical
patterns of condemnation throughout o u r'
history.” The cheap fix of Gavin Newsom’s
Care Not Cash program and Rudy Gufliani’s
attempt to sweep away New York homeless
like broken glass are paralleled by 19th
century social workers who concluded poor
people were lazy, defective degenerates who
heeded rehabilitation by learning the value
of work, and so sent them to forced labor
workhouses “breaking rocks.”
Doug Minkler is a satirist who has a close
connection with street Jife. His “Who Drives
The Cycle of Poverty” was commissioned by
the National Lawyers Guild in response to
welfeire “reform” under President Clinton,
which Minkler says did “a lot more damage
than any Republican.” The National
Lawyer’s Guild, seeing this “as a real attack
on women, (and) the poor, hired me to do a
. piece on the concept.”
Did Hazelwood choose it for. the show
“cycle,” its studded tires gunned toward us
by a vicious boar-like pig? For its very
existence, our capitalistrepublic seems to
require, at varying levels of intensity,
poverty’s perpetual presence, cycling
endlessly round: Out of its exhaust pours
poisonous gas — welfare cute, layoffs,
unemployment, homelessness.
“Who drives this cycle?” Minkler asks.
“Welfare queens? Illegal aliens? Bleeding ,
heart liberals? Capitalist pigs? Crash the
cycle of poverty! ”
Hazelwood is himself a San Francisco
artist whose etching-style linocuts have .
appeared in San Francisco’s “Street Sheet” .
and the East Bay’s “StreetSpirit” print
papers since 1994, and more recently in
Street Roots.
A year and a half before the economy
plunged and the* banking crisis caused home
foreclosures, mass evictions, and a surge in
homelessness, Hazelwood planned a
commemoration of the New Deal’s 75th
anniversary. , During talks about parallels
between the Depression era and today with
the Western Regional Advocacy Project’s
Berkeley professor Dr. Gray Brechin, it
struck Hazelwood that a show comparing
homelessness in the ’30s with 1
Contemporary homelessness was a brilliant
way to make clear to people, “We’ve been
through this before. We can get through it
again. If we try, we can do something to
(solve) thisproblem.” .
The show’s sections focus on four aspects
oFhomelessness: daily realities;
displacement, rootlessness and vulnerability;
urban vs. rural; and struggle and hope.
he show contrasts thetwo eras and
challenges our narrow range of
homeless stereotypes. Homeless people are
many and varied. People live in cars, in the
country, hold down jobs, work recycling, live
in — or refuse - dangerous shelters for the
street.
In Christine Hanlon’s contemporary oil
painting, “Third Street Corridor” and Isac
Friedhnder’s “Gold digger,” (1932) people
struggle, working hard for little. In
“Corridor,” the shopping cart is conversely
an overfull garbage collection device and a
horn of plenty, the ironic symbol of rampant
consumerism, while in “Gold digger,” trash
becomes pure gold to a ragged scavenger.
Most don’t consider tented people
working in fields as homeless. Depression
artist Dorothea Lange photographed a
young mother seated in. a Ford near
Tulelake, Calif,, with her two babies, one
holding a nippled Coke bottle (1939).
Nearby hangs David Bacon’s photo of a
Mexican mother and child camped on a
hillside in Del Mar, Calif. “They are still the
■
S e e ¿EHOLDER, p a g e 9
Above, “A n d now where?” by Rockwell Kent,
1882, .1971. Lithograph. Courtesty o f private
collection.
I
A t left, Christ o f the B readline (1953), by
F ritz Eichehberg, (1901-1990) Wood ,
Engraving. Courtesy o f University o f Rhode
Island Library Special Collections
. P H O T O S C O U R T E S Y 'O F T H E W E S T E R N R E G IO N A L
A D V O C A C Y PROJ EC T