UnHomeless NYC

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4:00 - 5:00     Opening Remarks by Housing activist Rob Robinson.  To attend this event, please register via Eventbrite.

5:00 - 7:00     Bibi Calderaro, Ignea (2021-) POSTPONED; RAIN DATE MARCH 16

Event description: Upcycle, Uplift proposes a utopian solution to the current housing crisis by developing a line of recycled clothing created in workshops and remodeled based on the needs of homeless people. The participatory project invites the public to engage in deep listenings with homeless people, opening themselves up to the complex issues that drive people to the street beyond the stereotypical assumptions. By designing and creating clothes that meet the needs of unhoused people, Upcycle, Uplift helps to restore dignity to those living on the street. Yasuda further tries to establish Upcycle, Uplift as a clothing brand and discusses with college students and faculty members concepts for an alternative economic system that can distribute profits in more egalitarian ways.

Born and raised in Japan, Yasuda moved to New York City in 2009 and has been creating artworks from the worldview of a woman and an ethnic minority. 

Performance work by artist Bibi Calderaro.

“Ignea: An Exchange about Nesting Technologies” Bibi Calderaro

Ignea: An Exchange About Nesting Technologies gathers audiences around a built fire to talk about possible ways to inhabit the planet, taking into account its scale, interdependencies, and temporalities. It proposes to rethink humanity’s relationship with fire, energy, and consumption.

Bibi Calderaro is an artist and educator who engages in transdisciplinary practice in order to expand her audience’s perceptual capacities to foster reciprocal, diverse, and ethical relationships among life forms. Her work aims at building ecological solidarity within and beyond humanity.

In-person artist talk and signage-making workshop

In-person film screening of Willie Baronet's film Signs of Humanity and director's talk

In this event, each participant will hold one homeless sign and march on campus to show their support for homeless people.  Starts from the Kingsborough Art Museum.

This online [Zoom] lecture traces the development of Beirne’s activist art and performance practice in relation to some precedents in modern art history. 

Event description: Held on Zoom (link will be sent after RSVP)

Participants: 10 Administrators / Staff and 10 Faculty  Three Facilitated Workshops focus on the impact of food and housing precarity on the well-being of students at Kingsborough Community College. The first two workshops use Intergroup Dialogue, a deep listening practice that highlights similarities and fosters understanding among different groups. The third workshop will be open to the public.

To register, please RSVP to Susan Jahoda (susan.e.jahoda@gmail.com)  Indicate which workshop(s) you will be attending.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. Among the group’s core members are Susan Jahoda, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.

In this talk, critical urbanist Manon Vergerio will give a brief background on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a web-based interactive mapping project that personalizes eviction data through the evictees’ stories of struggle and resistance. She will discuss how the multimedia collective uses oral history and mapping for housing activism. Participants will listen to a few short clips from the AEMP’s oral history archive and reflect on them through a series of prompts as a way to learn about displacement, housing, and organizing.

Manon Vergerio is an organizer and a critical urbanist whose practice draws across disciplines to illuminate and organize around urban justice issues. Vergerio is a co-founder of the NYC chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP).

CohStra’s Venice Architecture Biennale piece, How to Begin Again: An Initiation Towards Unitary Urbanism, is a response to the question curator Hashim Sarkis posed, “How will we live together” in the midst of global crises like climate change, wealth inequality, mass migrations, political polarization, and now pandemics? The current state of global, neoliberal urbanization exploits communities, cultures, and the environment. How to Begin Again is a 4-step initiation to a new awareness about alternatives for the future of urban design. It centers on the concept of unitary urbanism, which CohStra redefines as “an anti-capitalist and transdisciplinary practice that attempts to bridge popular and scientific knowledge to co-produce social and environmental justice in cities.”

In 2008, the urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán, together with his work partners Lucia Babina, Emiliano Gandolfi, and Gabriela Rendón, founded Stichting Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), an international nonprofit cooperative for socio-spatial research and development based in Rotterdam and New York City. CohStra focuses on conditions of urban decline, inequality, and segregation within the contemporary city. The group developed and designed over a dozen transdisciplinary urban projects in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, utilizing different methodologies to structure frameworks that catalyze grassroots-led transformations.

Event description: Held on Zoom. Discussant, Nina Felshin (editor of But Is it Art? The Spirit of Art and Activism) [Online; Zoom]

Concurrent with the explosion of homelessness in the 1980s, conceptual artist Hope Sandrow began volunteering at the Catherine Street Family Shelter in Chinatown in 1987. While making art and producing a resident-written newsletter, she learned that homelessness resulted from poverty and a host of other conditions, such as job loss, domestic violence, racial and sexual discrimination, illness, and injury. Witnessing the appalling reality at the shelter, where women were often sexually violated, resonated with Sandrow’s own experience of sexual abuse. In the early 1990s, Sandrow began the Artist & Homeless Collaborative (A&HC) at the Park Avenue Armory (renamed Lenox Hill Neighborhood House in 1996), which houses women over the age of forty-five. Attempting to close the gap between art-making and social action, Sandrow visited the dormitory, invited each woman in residence individually to participate in collective art making with art professionals, and explored the transformative potential of art in public and private life. While shelter residents were often deprived of their privacy and identity, the A&HC helped to heighten self-esteem in its residents, resulting in some successfully getting out of the shelter system. By 1994, the A&HC involved a hundred or so professional artists and 2,000 shelter residents. Part of the A&HC artworks are on view at the New York Historical Society, Art for Change: The Artist and Homeless Collaborative exhibition (Dec. 3, 2021–Apr. 3, 2022).

Sandrow will discuss her project with Nina Felshin, the editor of But Is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle, WA; Bay Press, 1995).

*Alternative date April 8 on Zoom if the in-person event on April 6, 2–4 p.m. cannot be held.

Participants: 5 Administrators / Staff, 5 Faculty, ideally from workshop #1, and 10 Students

Three Facilitated Workshops focus on the impact of food and housing precarity on the well-being of students at Kingsborough Community College. The first two workshops use Intergroup Dialogue, a deep listening practice that highlights similarities and fosters understanding among different groups. The third workshop will be open to the public.

To register please RSVP to Susan Jahoda (susan.e.jahoda@gmail.com) 

Indicate which workshop(s) you will be attending.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. Among the group’s core members are Susan Jahoda, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.

Event description: Upcycle, Uplift proposes a utopian solution to the current housing crisis by developing a line of recycled clothing created in workshops and remodeled based on the needs of homeless people. The participatory project invites the public to engage in deep listenings with homeless people, opening themselves up to the complex issues that drive people to the street beyond the stereotypical assumptions. By designing and creating clothes that meet the needs of unhoused people, Upcycle, Uplift helps to restore dignity to those living on the street. Yasuda further tries to establish Upcycle, Uplift as a clothing brand and discusses with college students and faculty members concepts for an alternative economic system that can distribute profits in more egalitarian ways.

Born and raised in Japan, Yasuda moved to New York City in 2009 and has been creating artworks from the worldview of a woman and an ethnic minority. 

Event description: Held on Zoom (link will be sent after RSVP)

Three Facilitated Workshops focus on the impact of food and housing precarity on the well-being of students at Kingsborough Community College. The first two workshops use Intergroup Dialogue—a deep listening practice that aims to highlight similarities and foster understanding among different groups.  This final WORKSHOP #3 will be a public event on Zoom and will create a dialogue with other projects included in the UnHomeless NYC exhibition.

To register please RSVP to Susan Jahoda (susan.e.jahoda@gmail.com)   Indicate which workshop(s)you will be attending.  

BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. Among the group’s core members are Susan Jahoda, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.