Thursday, March 25 and Friday, March 26 from 12pm to 1:30pm, in advance of the UnHomeless NYC exhibition scheduled to open in fall 2021 (alternative dates in spring 2022) at the Kingsborough Art Museum.
The event is sponsored by CUNY’s Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH), a visionary program designed to support engaged, active humanities pedagogy and recognize the transformative power of teaching for CUNY’s diverse population of students. The three-year initiative is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
UnHomeless NYC is a participatory pedagogical exhibition that invites artists, activists, students, professors, and the community to learn about critical issues related to housing insecurity and land use.
Workshop participants will be introduced to the participatory aspects of the exhibition. The guest speakers’ talks will offer ideas about how housing insecurity and land use can be developed into various academic disciplines, with the ultimate goal of developing ideas on how to take part in and/or integrate the exhibition into their fall semester course planning.
Participating artists (in alphabetical order): William Baronet and Michael Corris, B.F.A., M.F.A., Ph.D., Susan Hoffman Fishman and Elena Kalman, Dominique Paul, Michael Rakowitz, Miguel Robles-Durán and Cohabitation Strategies, Martha Rosler, Hope Sandrow and The Artists and Homeless Collaborative, Dread Scott, The Institute for Wishful Thinking, Manon Vergerio, and Sachigusa Yasuda.
SESSION ONE: Thursday, March 25, 2021 – 12pm-1:30pm
To RSVP for Day One, click here.
Day One introduces the artwork by 12 artists and artist groups. It features:
- A virtual gallery tour led by Thomas Mintz and Midori Yamamura, followed by a close look at one of the works included in the show, Miguel Robles-Durán and Cohabitation Strategies’ (CohStra: http://www.cohstra.org/) video, Uneven Growth (2014).
- Guest speaker Rob Robinson, who appears in Uneven Growth, will speak about how his personal experiences with being homeless helped him to understand neoliberal gentrification, a process that affects land use, creates homelessness, and changes people’s relation to housing in New York City.
- An open a discussion with all attendees, moderated by Mintz and Yamamura, with a discussant Maureen Connor, the project’s external adviser.
RELEVANT READING:
Tom Angotti, “Top-down Comprehensive Planning Will Further Empower Those on Top,” Citylimits, 13 Jan. 2021.
SESSION TWO: Friday, March 26, 2021 – 12pm-1:30pm
To RSVP for Day Two, click here.
Day Two connects the exhibition with the classroom and the community. It asks participants to think from the ground up to reflect on society. It features:
- Farmer, activist and co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS), Karen Washington’s TED Talk, about how she leveraged her experience as a black woman in a society that puts her at a disadvantage to become a community leader.
- Organizer and a critical urbanist Manon Vergerio, whose practice works across disciplines to illuminate and organize around urban justice issues, including co-founding the NYC chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization and storytelling collective documenting evictions and the housing crisis, and working to develop Unlock NYC, a mobile-based app to report on housing discrimination in New York.
- Kingsborough student Peter Ayala, who will speak about his learning experiences.
- Breakout groups with participating artists Susan Hoffman Fishman and Elena Kalman, Manon Vergerio, Sachigusa Yasuda, and The Institute for Wishful Thinking where attendees can discuss and submit their ideas for the exhibition using a Google form, which will be published on the UnHomeless NYC website: https://homelessnyc.commons.gc.cuny.edu.
RELEVANT READING:
Gregory Jost, “To Stop Displacement, Disclose the Data,” Urban Minibus, 4 Sept. 2019.
