Rail: It strikes me that there are a few familiar ideas about what might constitute the “art project” of Public Address. The conversation with folks in terms of making the log book workshop sessions is one (social practice); the signs are another (objects and production). As you talk about it, it seems like these more nameable “art” ideas are actually an excuse for a different art project. First, how to get all of these people to work together toward a shared goal, which asks them to use their material resources and their skills in ways that they may not have had the permission or opportunity to beforehand. On the other side of the production, because they’re public artworks and they’re situated in public space, the objects you make have the opportunity to challenge conventions of space and use by becoming chairs or rests, reminiscent of signs. You get both an engagement with the object in terms of what it depicts and “looks like” and also an engagement with the object as an actor in public space. This denies the idea of the spectator as the end audience of art and rather allows for the works themselves to become participants inside of a civic structure that we recognize (and mis-recognize), both in terms of their format and how they communicate their own subject matter. If the objects are representational, it is of the systems you’re talking about rather than of people or subject matter.
The visual elements you are working with are also really exciting. When I visited Petrosino Square last week, it was a gorgeous day. People were resting their feet on the stands, the birds were using the stands for their own purposes [laughs]. I started thinking about the shapes of signs as geometric abstraction that we use as language to tell us how to be and use things in the city. Changing the expected shape of the signs can also change the idea of what we might expect these shapes to communicate. Sometimes, the signs which are drawings hang on either side of the park fence, becoming both signage and a more playful decoration of our public space, allowing for shape and direction to be more expressive than normal. Looking at the stands, I was reminded of the utopian brutalist architecture of many other parts of the world. It feels important to note that all of the visual references you bring into the work are also good teachers and really fun to experience alongside the meaningful experiences of reading the entries.
Strada: Aesthetics are very important to my practice in general, but especially for this work. If there weren’t drawings, if there wasn’t color, if the bases didn’t invite you to sit… it might be hard to get people to actually stay and engage with a subject that is chronically talked about in broad strokes or ignored. This work is nuanced, and it asks you to sit and stay with many different perspectives that are sometimes in conflict.
Another important aspect of the work’s form is its movement and scale in relation to content. As it travels borough-by-borough, there will be one large installation in a city park, with smaller signs installed on driverails and lampposts in every community district of that borough. I put a lot of thought into which sign appears in each district, including conducting mapping research to consider what the entries might mean in relation to the shelter placement, because the distribution of shelters in the city reflects profound inequities.
Community District 2, where the Petrosino installation is located, includes Greenwich Village, SoHo, NoHo, Little Italy, and part of Chinatown, and currently has no shelters. By contrast, neighborhoods in the South Bronx, East Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side—areas still shaped by the legacy of redlining—have many. There is never a monolithic audience, but this first iteration is about inviting people into the conversation. In CD2, there is a history of NIMBYism, with residents working to block shelters or affordable housing—often out of fear that property values will drop. The installation is meant to question this link between real estate and value and to assert that addressing homelessness is part of what it means to live in NYC. This is required, public work both for city agencies and city residents.
Rail: This project is so nuanced and layered that it blooms in the mind the more I learn about your process and these implications. It creates a sense of civic responsibility around itself, maybe through systems, as we’ve been discussing, but more profoundly in the sense that at the heart of the work is a focus on people: who is impacted by homelessness, who works and uses shelters, who works in city government. Housing is so foundational as a part of social organization; our relationship to housing can expose our shared, and often inadequate, understanding of what it means to live together. Obviously, working with city government creates much more access to the kinds of systems we have been talking about. You also work with more direct access structures. I first learned about your work through a project you did at Pratt Institute last year called Collective Mobilities. Can you talk about that project and its impact?
Strada: Collective Mobilities was a project initially made at Pratt, where I teach, and I am currently the Fine Arts’ Civic Engagement Fellow. It continues to live on and iterate in different forms. I am part of a mutual aid group that meets every weekend to give out hot food and clothing. The group started meeting in front of Hall Street, which was once one of the largest migrant shelters in New York City, which has since been shut down. It’s turning into condos, unsurprisingly, but we still continue to meet and have a really beautiful, sustained community. Pratt is a private art school where there are a lot of interested students wanting to move beyond the gates of campus. I wanted to come up with a structure that would invite participation in different models of making and redistribution. This led to these “Mutual Aid Mobile” sculptures that are used to collect and redistribute clothing.
Shelters usually don’t have capacity to be able to accept lightly used clothing, since this work involves looking through each item and making sure they are clean, seasonal, and ready to wear. The project was a way to help fulfill some of the need for clothes at a moment when a lot of people were coming to New York and were not well-equipped for freezing temperatures. It was a massive collective effort on campus. Each week we would load the mobiles up with the donations that were given and physically move them, traversing sidewalks, bringing them out to the mutual aid site. Usually, clothes are distributed on cardboard on the ground. It’s not as dignified as it could be. This project intended to equip people with clothes that they need, but also choice. A lot of people started coming to “shop” at the gallery, looking for clothes for church, for getting married, for someone’s birthday. I remember someone donated this sequined dress, which I was convinced no one would take. An hour after it was dropped off, someone came and was like, “This is perfect. This is what I need for my friend’s birthday!” [Laughter.] The basic rule of social services is, if you’re supporting one person, you have to be able to support everyone. Mutual aid is very different in the sense that it’s ad hoc, it’s grassroots. You might not be able to help everyone, but you might be able to really help one person fulfill their needs, and you also learn about networks of support beyond governmental social structures.
Rail: It’s also a way of thinking about collective responsibility using multiple, distinct approaches at once. We have both a responsibility to make structures that serve us that might take more time to develop and also a responsibility to be flexible about what the immediate needs of our communities might be. Of course, design can reference various visual ideologies and social programs, too. The mobiles feel like they are riffing on Memphis design. I kept thinking about design in your work as a way to activate historical styles that were also invested in social change. It feels like there are specific hopes or wishes that are embedded in certain kinds of styles and objects that we can reanimate by using them on the surface, and in your case, literally.
Strada: This ties back to the importance of aesthetics—the seduction of color and the desire to create something that invites touch and engagement. Lining the walls of the exhibition were maps that explored different entry points into understanding homelessness, using the same color palette as the mobiles. For example, one map displayed the locations of every non-emergency homelessness-related complaint called into 311 in 2024. As a series, the maps revealed a pattern: neighborhoods with the most vacant or luxury apartments tended to have the fewest shelters and the highest number of complaints about homelessness. By having the maps and the mobiles use the same pallet, I wanted students to understand how data of systemic inequities can be activating—a starting point from which to work as socially-engaged artists.
Rail: This kind of mapping reminds us of how systems are constructed. That there’s a plasticity to how we make our civic life, and that we can use our ideas about art or aesthetics, or what it means to think in a creative way, in the creation of social relations.
Strada: I think that’s so true, and today, especially, feels hopeful with the results of Mamdani’s win. If we had had this conversation last week, it would feel more about reclaiming and rerouting, the work of the undercommons. I hope today, we are welcoming in someone who wants to legislate out in the open in the way we’ve been talking about. My hope is that art and public life will become less and less separate.
Rail: Yes, I hope there can be more of a sense that we can make our city together, and that art should be a part of it, including in the interdepartmental, logistical process. I’m also wondering if you could, at this point, knowing what we know now about these projects, let us know how you became interested in working in this way. What led you into institutional critique and what led you into wanting to work with the city on homelessness?
Strada: I’m very much a New Yorker. I’ve lived here most of my life. I also have people in my immediate and extended family who struggle with a lot of the same issues that some people in shelters struggle with: mental illness, substance use, disability, eviction, housing insecurity, and the difficulties of securing public benefits. I do have pride for our complex, flawed city. I think we should be more proud of the right to shelter and what it offers in terms of a potential promise of a right to housing. By working with DHS, I wanted to understand what it means to fulfill the right to shelter every day and to serve as the “safety net of the safety net.” A central joy that has emerged from this project has been the relationships I’ve built with DHS residents and staff.
Regarding institutional critique more broadly, I think that as a socially engaged artist, as someone who is invested in thinking about systems from different vantage points, the more you engage with different institutions, the more you also realize they’re just people. Systems are socially reproduced, and because of that, they could be reproduced in other ways. The more we demystify this idea of an institution or government as something that is separate from us, the more that we can actually reroute and reclaim power. I am also very much a student of art history, and I’m interested in how to learn from and borrow from artists like Fred Wilson or Martha Rosler and build on those lineages. And for me, it took one hundred emails to get people across city departments to agree to something, but maybe now another artist could do a project that seemed off limits before because there is a precedent. It’s about leaving the door open for people to come with you and keep changing and pushing our work forward.