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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (July 10, 2009)
n 9 Street roots Education * Dialogue ♦ Independence BEHOLDER, from page 8 same,” said Terry. “The only difference is nowadays they would take your kids from you.” Terry was brought up housed in Seattle: She knew nothing of homelessness until she lost her home and the state transferred custody of her three children to relatives. • She says she and her husband were forced to leave town, and she has not seen her children for eight years. She found personal strength in street survival. The horiieless woman seated among feet in Christine Hanlon’s “Faux Street Revisited” depressed Terry. Being “invisible” to passersby on the street is hard. Understanding this human need for respect arid dignity, Hanlon stated she constructed the space so vanishing points lead to the homeless woriian’s heart. The | viewer looks up - not down - at her. oor, fragilely housed or unhoused San Franciscans like my invitees Terry, Eric Robinson, David Suttles, and Travis, lose homes for various reasons - renter or home owner evictions, loss of paychecks and work, or illness. Eric couch surfs with a friend while saving up rent. Terry sleeps in daylight, walking nights for safety. David sells “Street Sheet” for rent for he' and his . wife. Travis was displaced from a hotel during a hospitalization but is temporarily housed again. Hazelwood believes the inevitable vulnerabilityof displacementand rootlessness is a U.'S, social norm. Our emphasis on money arid “moving up”' tears us from our safety nets. Giacomo Fatri’s illustrated novel, “White Collar,” (1938) tells of a middle-class working stiff on the “advancement” treadmill. The stock market crashes. With repeated firings, Patri’s character converts^ ■ a s .Hazelw ood te lls i t . iro jn B“sn eerixia disinterest iff revolutionary speakers and blue-collar organizers he passes on the street” to being blacklisted for unionizing white-collar workers. He and his wife becoriie horiieless. Catholicism and the ’¡60s and ’70s backlash against war arid capitalism seemed to have sensitized Jos Sances to the twin cruelties of privilege and poverty. Sances’ symbolism thrusts the viewer into the reality and heart of homelessness. A Boston- bom, Irish-Sicilian altar boy, Santes matured out of his “devout” Catholicism and the mythology of Christ as deity. He became an atheist, but preserved in his art the fragile beauty of Jesus’ humanity. Eric Robinson warmed to Sances ceramic image of Jesus’ “Sacred Heart” surrounding, and then evicting, a mother, father, ¿rid two babies from its loving embrace. Eric, his parents and twin siblings suffered such an eviction. “The symbol of the Sacred Heart is profound,” Sances says. “Christ’s compassion for us, the flawed ones.” , The piece came from Sances’ wash “that people exhibited ftiofe Cdmpassiori for people in need. There are wonderful Catholics, committed to social action and helping people in distress, working hard to change the system so people aren’t . victimized.”“ c . However, the piece is meant to be a betrayal, too, Sances says. “This sacred heart that is holding them is also evicting them. The heart is the container of love,” yet “the darker side of the piece” is that, “because they don’t have the money to pay their rent, they are being evicted from this vessel of Jove — expelled from the community.” “Sacred Heart” symbolizes,- “the callousness of people allowing that to happen. The price of the callousness for those poor people, and the pain they suffer, is enonrious,” says Sances. . , J Post-Ronald Reagan, Hazelwood observed, we have seen the total destruction of the social safety net and a progressive downward slide into complete defunding of federal money for public housing. Hazelwood’s 8 “Spirit of Abandon” and Claude Moller’s Above, “Homeless go home,” by Nili Yosha. A t right, “Home ” (2006) by Kiki Smith, (1954-). Courtesy of Crown Point Press, Both works are part of the Hobos to Street People exhibit touring Venues across California. “Housing Crisis: Condition Critical,” rènder pictorially accessible the harsh statistics that clarify urban affordable housing defunding. M o st p e o p le t h i n k of h o m e le s sn e s s as urban. Ed Gould’s “America’s Forgotten Horiieless People” charts the disappearance last year of rural affordable housing. Terry worries about people in the country. “They couldn’t survive likèwe can here (in the cities) because there is nothing for them out there.” azelwood compared today’s poverty imagery with Depression era'art that refused to divest the poor of nobility or hope. - He believes hope was stronger in Depression artists than today. Rockwell Kent’s skillful lithograph, “And Now , Where?” etches an uprooted couple as in stone or steel, statue-like, peering lovingly together into their future. Richard Correll’s “Drought” displays a proud farm woman, “strong, independent and able to deal with life’s difficulties,” according to Correll. Both the attitudes of the uprooted and contemporary iriiagery mirror the hopeless struggle of today’s homelessness. Travis’ father tost the family carpentry business and his mother her nursing job. Their Detroit home was foreclosed. Travis left so he wouldn’t burden them. He saw the noble couple iri “And Now Where?” through a contemporary lens. The illustration , reminded him that, despite their love, his parents could not verbalize mutual pain. In Kiki Smith’s drawing, “Home,” sleeping boots stick from a cardboard box.. This image reminded Travis of his gratitude at being protected by a lowly cardboard box during subzero Manhattan winter nights. , JarielnVain Winkelman compares her colorful “New Drop Dead Welfare Center” to Auschwitz-like ovens. She paints about her eviction, wishing for “free lethal injections. Why couldn’t they just kill all of us then, and end our horrendous suffering? Wouldn’t that be more humane?” Norman Rockwell is several times satirized in this show. His “Freedotii from Want” is a homey thanksgiving dinner. Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear” — a couple putting their son to bed as the husbarid ’ holds a-paper with a World War II headline - suggests we’re safe here in America. H By contrast, in Hazelwood’s series “Four ; Freedoms,” “Freedom from Fear” displays a homeless man’s sign saying, “Beaten, robbed, help please.” “Freedom of Assembly” is the right to line up for food outside a church. Hazelwood satirizes - Rockwell’s evocation of FDR’s vision of a hopeful future and the failed dreams of 1950s America. •Jesus Barraza’s 2001 San Francisco Print Collective poster bears the words: “How many Homeless people does it take to start a revolution?” Across it is written, “There are'15,000 homeless people in San Francisco. Is that enough?” A black, silhouetted figure holding a gun poses before an.orange shopping cart. “When that came out,” Hazelwood observed, “it was vilified and mocked by The Chronicle.”1 “Poor people’s rebellions are not unheard of ” says Hazelwood, relating that, as the Depression began, dispossessed World War I vets, the “Bonus Army,” were denied benefits. “When they protested in Washington^, President Hoover ordered (jeneral MacArthur to clear the Mall, and he led the last cavalry charge in U.S. history against U.S. military veterans.” In 1968, Dr. King’s Poor People marched down that same Mall. “It happens,” muttered David Suttles, as he slid past the poster toward Eric Drooker’s “Sleeping Giant,” slumped over a streetlight, unaware of its powerful size. WRAP director Paul Boden calls for a serious re-evaluation of federal portrayal, support and funding of homelessness. San Francisco city government created “Care Not Cash,” bom from our government’s position that the United States address poverty by putting the blame on the poor and homeless as if there is something wrong with them. ■ The New Deal-era government humanized, supported, and funded images of the poor. New York’s mayor and public housing director paid an artist to create the •1936 poster about Manhattan’s rundown tenements titled “Must We Always Have This? Why Not Housing?” The New Deal-era goverriinent Boden says, supported artists and artwork portraying a “broken system” which must be made new. Conversely, modem government and media promote images of poor and homeless as “broken people to be fixed.” Boden notes this show encourages our reassessment of the ways we see and. talk about homelessness and poverty. “If we can bomb and rebuild Iraq, we can rebuild South of Market.” Massive war funding and bank bailouts ■ teH us how quickly sociopolitical will makes money available. Hazelwood reaffirmed the exhibit’s purpose in an historical sense. “We’ve been through this before. We can rise to the occasion again. The government did something (about the Depression). The government could do something (about our current economic crisis, poverty, and homelessness). We don’t have to live with this terrible situation. We can, get through it” This article first appeared in Street Sheet, a sister street papers in San Francisco.
