Terry “Tresa” Chandler stood in the vaulted art gallery. Her tiny 4’11” figure was dwarfed by the colorful painting of a boy walking to school past a rotten tomato splashed against graffiti on a wall, ordering, “Homeless Go Home.” He is protected by four adults as he walks to a school for homeless children. Artist, Nili Yosha, crafted the work after Norman Rockwell’s illustration of guards escorting a small black girl into a newly integrated Little Rock school.

Terry tilted her head, peering at me with a shy, sardonic smile. “When people say this,” she observed, “they are doing it to be mean.”

“It’s good that homeless people get to see [this show] too. Then we can tell you if it’s real or not.”

“The best thing about this show is it makes people think.” Her voice echoed slightly, “I live it. It’s so real. All this is so true.”

In April, four formerly or presently unhoused San Franciscans and I visited the California Historical Society at 678 Mission Street. We viewed a collection of paintings, prints, photographs, and mixed media pieces by more than 40 artists represented in an exhibition entitled “Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present.” The show began February 19 and continues to August 15.

Terry once slept in nearby Annie Alley next to a dumpster pictured in an exhibit photo. After one night on the street, restlessly avoiding dangerous, biting rats, Eric Robinson stays in shelters or with friends. David Suttles camped in the street with his wife after a corrupt hotel management eviction. Travis read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath just before he was forced to leave home.

Curator Art Hazelwood reported positive reactions to the show. Visitors’ occasional negative responses reflect a “demonization” of homelessness and homeless people by the press and social stereotyping. “People want to turn homeless people into a kind of Other that they can dismiss. It’s easier to dismiss people if you categorize them and accuse them of being morally lax.”

Terry agreed. Her brown bangs swung adamantly. “The newspaper tells people things that aren’t true, and people believe it. ”

This false stereotype, “is not something new. One answer to almost any complaint,“ Hazelwood stated, “is to point to identical patterns of condemnation throughout our history.” The cheap fix of Gavin Newsom’s Care Not Cash program and Rudy Guiliani’s attempt to sweep away New York homeless like broken glass are paralleled by 19th century social workers who concluded poor people were lazy, defective degenerates who needed rehabilitation by learning the value of work, and so sent them to forced labor workhouses “breaking rocks.”

Doug Minkler is a satirist who, selling his art on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, has a close connection with street life. Eric was drawn by its color and dynamism to Minkler’s “Who Drives the Cycle of Poverty?”

Clinton dismantled welfare in 1996, calling it “reform,” but, “doing a lot more damage than any Republican,” said Minkler. “The National Lawyer’s Guild, seeing this ‘as a real attack on women, [and] the poor,’ hired me to do a piece on the concept.”

Did Hazelwood choose it for the show because it satirizes the perpetual poverty “cycle,” its studded tires gunned toward us by a vicious boar. For its very existence, our capitalist republic seems to require, at varying levels of intensity, poverty’s perpetual presence, cycling endlessly round. Out of its exhaust pours poisonous gas—welfare cuts, layoffs, unemployment, homelessness. “Who drives this cycle?” Minkler asks. “Welfare Queens? Illegal Aliens? Bleeding heart liberals? Capitalist Pigs? Crash the Cycle of Poverty!” or it will drive on and on, carrying the hog to hell.

Hazelwood is himself a San Francisco artist whose etching-style linocuts have enlivened the pages of San Francisco’s Street Sheet and the East Bay’s Street Spirit print papers since 1994.

A year and a half before the economy plunged and the banking crisis caused home foreclosures, mass evictions, and a surge in homelessness, Hazelwood planned a commemoration of the New Deal’s 75^th anniversary. During talks with the Western Regional Advocacy Project’s Paul Boden and New Deal expert Berkeley professor Dr. Gray Brechin about parallels between the Depression era and today, it struck Art that a show comparing homelessness in the ‘30s with contemporary homelessness was a brilliant way to make clear to people: “We’ve been through this before. We can get through it again. If we try, we can do something to [solve] this problem.”

The show’s sections focus on four aspects of homelessness:

DAILY REALITIES

The show contrasts the two eras and challenges our narrow range of homeless stereotypes. Homeless people are many and varied. People live in cars, in the country, hold down jobs, work recycling, live in—or refuse—dangerous shelters.

In Christine Hanlon’s contemporary oil painting “Third Street Corridor” and Isac Friedlander’s “Gold digger” (1932), people struggle, working hard for little. In “Corridor,” the shopping cart is conversely a overfull garbage collection device and the Horn of Plenty, the ironic symbol of rampant consumerism, while in “Gold digger,” trash becomes pure gold to a ragged scavenger.

Most don’t consider tented people working in fields as homeless. Depression artist Dorothea Lange, photographed a young mother with her two babies, one holding a nippled Coke bottle, seated in a Ford near Tulelake, California (1939). Nearby hangs David Bacon’s photo of a Mexican mother and child camped on a hillside outside in Del Mar, California. “They are still the 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 gave her three children to relatives. When she refused to rat on a friend, fraudulent police pressure and intense harassment forced Terry and her husband to leave town. She has not seen her children for eight years. She found personal strength in street survival.

The homeless woman seated among feet in Christine Hanlon’s “Faux Street Revisited” depressed her. Being “invisible” to passersby on the street is hard. She humanizes herself by drawing people into conversation. She smiles,“I get smart with them sometimes. I say, ‘Close your eyes. I’m not here. If I’m so invisible asking for help, I guess I’m that invisible when I tell you what I think of you.’”

Understanding this human need for respect and dignity, Hanlon stated she constructed the space so vanishing points lead to the homeless woman’s heart. The viewer looks up—not down—at her.

DISPLACEMENT, ROOTLESSNESS AND VULNERABILITY

Poor, fragilely housed or unhoused San Franciscans 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 Sheets for rent for his wife and himself. Travis was displaced from a hotel during a hospitalization but is temporarily housed again.

Hazelwood believes the inevitable vulnerability of displacement and rootlessness is a US social norm. Our emphasis on money and ”moving up” tears us from our safety nets.

Giacomo Patri’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, as Hazelwood tells it, from, “sneering disinterest in revolutionary speakers and blue collar organizers he passes on the street,” to being blacklisted for unionizing white collar workers. He and his wife become homeless.

Catholicism and the ‘60s/’70s backlash against war and capitalism seemed to sensitize Jos Sances to the twin cruelties of privilege and poverty. Sances’ symbolism thrusts the viewer into the reality and heart of homelessness. A Boston-born Irish-Sicilian altar boy, Sances 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, then evicting, a mother, father, and two babies from its loving embrace. Eric, his parents and twin siblings suffered such an eviction.

For Sances, “the symbol of the Sacred Heart is profound—Christ’s compassion for us, the flawed ones.”

The piece came from Sances’ “wish that people exhibited more compassion 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” by such a cruel eviction.

However, the piece is “meant to be a betrayal, too. 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 love—expelled from the community.”

“Sacred Heart” symbolizes “the callousness that people allowed that to happen. The price of the callousness for those poor people, and the pain they suffer, is enormous.”

URBAN VS. RURAL

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 American cities’ public housing. Hazelwood’s “Spirit of Abandon” and Claude Moller’s “Housing Crisis: Condition Critical” render pictorially accessible the harsh statistics that clarify urban affordable housing defunding.

Most people think of homelessness as urban. Ed Gould’s,”America’s Forgotten Homeless People,” charts the disappearance of rural affordable housing. Terry worries about people in the country. “They couldn’t survive like we can here [in the cities] because there is nothing for them out there.”

STRUGGLE AND HOPE

Hazelwood compared today’s poverty imagery with Depression-era art which refused to divest the poor of nobility or hope.

He believes hope was stronger in Depression artists than it is 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.”

Both the attitudes of the uprooted and contemporary imagery mirror the hopeless struggle of today’s homelessness. After traveling guitarist/carpenter, Travis’ father lost their 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 in “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.

Jane “in Vain” 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?“ Her “Greedy Landlords I Can’t Pay Your Rent,” seems a stressed response to living perpetually on the edge.

Norman Rockwell is several times satirized in this show. His “Freedom from Want” is a homey thanksgiving dinner. Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear”—a couple putting their son to bed as the husband holds a paper with a World War II headline—suggests, “We’re safe here in America.”

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 like Glide. Hazelwood satirizes Rockwell’s evocation of FDR’s vision of a hopeful future and the failed dreams of 1950s America.

The words, “Everyone has a right” march across Robert Terrell’s Market street photographs, brutally portraying an elderly homeless woman and an AIDS sufferer accompanied by a quote from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the US is a signatory, guaranteeing housing for all. The bitter reality mocks the Rockwell-like promise.

Jesus Barraza’s 2001 San Francisco Print Collective poster bears the words: “How Many People Do You Need to Start a Revolution?” Below 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.”

“Poor people’s rebellions are not unheard of,” asserted Hazelwood, relating that, as the Depression began, dispossessed World War I Vets, the “Bonus Marchers,” were denied benefits.“ When they protested in Washington, “President Hoover ordered General MacArthur to clear the Mall, and he led the last cavalry charge in US history against US 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 street light, unaware of its powerful size.

Paul Boden, calls for a serious re-evaluation of Federal portrayal, support, and funding of homelessness. San Francisco City government created “Care Not Cash,” born from our Government’s position that the United States addresses poverty by putting the blame on the poor and homeless as if there is something wrong with them.

But 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 entitled “Why Must We Always Have This?”

The New Deal era government, according to Boden, supported artists and art work portraying a “Broken System” which needed to be made new. Conversely, modern government and media promote images of poor and homeless people 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 tell us how quickly socio-political will makes money available.

Hazelwood reaffirmed the exhibit’s purpose. Looking at this history, he says that we can say, “We’ve been through this before. We can rise to the occasion again… We don’t have to live with this terrible situation. We can get through it.”

As part of a lecture series about this exhibit, on Thursday, August 6, Curator Art Hazelwood, will moderate a panel discussion with artists mentioned in this article Christine Hanlon, Jos Sances, Doug Minkler, and Jesus Barrraza, who will discuss their work. California Historical Society, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Free.

Carol

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