Homelessness

Homelessness was a series of large-scale portraits featuring the images and voices of unhoused community members, installed on the outer walls of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts site during its construction in San Francisco.

In 1992 when Michael Rios, Barry McGee and I were awarded commissions to paint the construction walls around the new fancy arts center being built in San Francisco—before painting on construction walls was a common occurrence—it was a big deal. For weeks, I would load my metal framed backpack with Krylon and Orr-Lac spray paint and commute on BART from my studio in Jingletown in Oakland to 3rd and Howard, like only a hungry, young, ambitious emerging artist would. It was also the beginning of making the “voice” of the model a priority. In the history of Western art that I had studied, the model in portraiture never had a voice—it was through the filter of the artist that we saw Gauguin’s nude ladies in Polynesia, or Walker Evans’ Great Depression families, or even superstar at that time Andres Serrano’s Klansmen. This project was the crude, simple beginnings of my career-long practice of making portraiture an ethnographic process to learn about myself, individuals, society, and culture, and to magnify the model’s voice in process and product.