The weekly blog, ALL THAT JAZZ
By JASMINE MAHMOUD
Published online: July 11, 2009

In the past year of bailouts and stimulus funds, much of the conversation and policy around national recovery has focused on and benefited those at the top. The bankers, the banks, the large corporations.  The top-down relief is unsettling because I believe that to best uplift all, we need to first take care of those at the bottom.  In the spirit of “an injury to one is an injury to all,” it seems ridiculous to spend billions of government dollars (tax payer money), buying up Citigroup when millions of people still go hungry everyday in this country. Where are, and what are our priorities?

"Four Freedoms," 1996 by Art Hazelwood, (1961 - ), Linocut Collection of the Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College of California

Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present, an exhibition currently running at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, calls attention to these issues. The exhibition features artistic representations of poverty from the New Deal era and the contemporary era. Photography, paintings and prints depict myriad forms of homelessness and poverty: breadlines, shantytowns, sleeping on the street. I checked out Hobos to Street People while visiting San Francisco last weekend, and talked with the exhibit’s curator, Art Hazelwood, whose visual art we feature in the Exhibition section of TAP’s inaugural issue (and whose art is at right). You can read more about the exhibition, and my interview with Art Hazelwood, here.

Hobos to Street People is remarkable for a few reasons:

1. It renders poverty visible. This is a feat quite miraculous when homelessness is made invisible through government policies that hide and criminalize poverty, through development that displaces poor populations, and through my own reactions to homelessness, which often overlook the poor, and ignore the street beggar. Visibility is just the start. The show forced my attention to homelessness to go beyond the poor individual.  As I paid attention to homelessness as portrayed in the 1930s, 1940s and in the last three decades, I better understood—through visual art created for leisure, for advocacy, or for mass media—how government and development policies of the New Deal, Reagan and contemporary eras have helped and have harmed the poor.

2. Collectively, it illuminates a portrait of poverty in America as un-American. I immersed myself in these images of poverty on July 3rd, a day before celebrating our nation’s birth. Hobos exposed what was and continues to be ugly in America—that in the richest nation in the world, vast poverty persists. After witnessing Hobos, I was uncomfortable celebrating the 233rd anniversary of the day that Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. Walking around San Francisco, or my current home Seattle, or my former home New York City and seeing the very poor, makes clear that one spirit of the Declaration of Independence (the spirit that government shall be organized on the principles of the safety and happiness of its people) has not been safeguarded.

3. It complicates the FDR/Obama dialogue by better situating the potent role that art holds in social change. It seems like everybody is talking about the two men who each became President during dire times in our nation’s history, with economic and housing crises, and high levels of income inequality. How will Obama’s policies echo FDR’s? Will President Obama find a way to harness this crisis and forge a new, bold positive direction for the United States? Artists are looking at the New Deal era, and arts policies of the 1930s (such as the WPA) to find a way to render arts in this decade relevant, and to find a way to use arts for effective political and social change.  In the 1930s, photographs of the indigent were used to influence policies that could alleviate poverty. As many look towards President Obama for “change”; the gaze must also turn towards artists—as it did in the 1930s—who raise pressing societal issues in their work.

We must also continue to direct the gaze towards our politicians, who hold tremendous power to drastically reduce poverty. During the March 2009 Presidential press conference, Kevin Chappell, Senior Editor of EBONY magazine, asked the President:  “With shelters at full capacity, tent cities are sprouting up across the country. In passing your stimulus package, you said that help was on the way, but what would you say to these families, especially children, who are sleeping under bridges and in tents across the country?” President Obama replied: “It is unacceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

Despite the President’s rhetoric and understanding, tent cities persist (even though many have been destroyed by the government), and as-Art Hazelwood told me: on July 1, the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority Department of Housing terminated the rent vouchers of 285 people, because of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s stringent rules. When politicians jump to secure the homes of Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, why can’t they do the same for our citizens?

The Office of Nancy Pelosi—U.S. House Speaker and Congresswoman from California’s 8th District (San Francisco)—has not accepted Art Hazelwood’s invitation to the exhibit.  Speaker Pelosi—our nation’s number three—holds tremendous power to alleviate suffering in this country and would likely find poverty more easily digestible through art. In fact, in the interview, Hazelwood says:

“I think this is probably the easiest way for policymakers to come see it. It’s an art and history show. … [I]t could be a good way for people to comfortably come in and talk about issues of poverty. I don’t think that many politicians are quite comfortable talking about poverty in any case.”

Politicians should be comfortable talking about poverty. Avoiding poverty is an injury to all. Giving lip service to poverty, but overseeing a housing department that rescinds rent vouchers is an injury to all. An injury to one is an injury to all.  Visual art is helpful in realizing these injuries, our collective injuries.  If you are in the Bay Area, please do what Nancy Pelosi and her staffers have not yet done—check out the show. It’s free, and it asks the spectator to pay close attention to homelessness and poverty—an injury often-ignored, but ever-present.