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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.