Figure 1

HOBOS TO STREET PEOPLE: ARTIST’S RESPONSES TO HOMELESSNESS FROM THE NEW DEAL TO THE PRESENT
by Art Hazelwood
Freedom Voices, 2011

In 1939, the iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) took and disseminated a photograph of a mother and her two children on the road in Siskiyou County, California (Figure 1). Like all of Lange’s Depression era images, this work reveals the powerful human pathos of poverty and homelessness. Viewers cannot fail to feel the agony and despair of a mother trying desperately to maintain her family in the midst of overwhelming economic catastrophe. Like hundreds of her photographs, this effort represents the essence of socially committed art, the result of a visual artist who used her creativity to call attention to the human face of social disruption and human suffering.

Art historians universally accept Lange as one of the masters of American photography, both for her outstanding artistic skills and for her profound empathy for the most marginalized members of society during the Great Depression. Her image is the first illustration in a new book entitled Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the Great Depression to the Present, written by socially conscious artist Art Hazelwood in conjunction with a traveling exhibition on homelessness art in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The second illustration in this book is a photograph by contemporary photographer David Bacon (1948-) of indigenous women and children from a community of farm workers from Oaxaca living in a camp outside Del Mar in 2005 (Figure 2). Equally powerful, this image, taken 66 years after Lange’s anguish-inducing effort, reminds us disconcertingly how little has changed in the United States. Bacon’s photograph calls attention to the desperate plight of migrant agricultural workers, among whom are many undocumented women and children demonized as “illegal aliens” and subjected to rhetorical taunts and actual violence by domestic terrorist groups like the Minutemen “border patrol.” The faces of the mother and her child reveal their true humanity as they strive to survive in a hostile political and economic landscape. Bacon’s image compels the audience to step back and confront this basic reality and it encourages viewers to mobilize morally against additional dehumanization of the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Figure 2

That has been the historic function of socially conscious art from the time of Francisco Goya, Honore Daumier, Kathe Kollwitz, Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, and scores of other giants of this tradition. This engaging volume adds 56 more compelling visual images to this remarkable tradition. The most striking feature of the book is its unnerving juxtaposition of older and newer artworks that reveal the persistence of poverty and homelessness in what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

Hazelwood brings his readers a powerful collection of older American political artists, all of whom have passed from the scene. Many are still well known and even make occasional appearances in scholarly and critical texts and college and university classrooms in art history and related fields. Figures like Dorothea Lange, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), Bernarda Byson Shahn (1903-2004), Anton Refregier (1905-1979), and Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) are effectively represented in this book with images that compel readers’ attention with critical subject matter about homelessness during the horrific years of the Great Depression. All of these works provide insightful visions about the depths of suffering during that era.

One of the author’s most durable contributions in this book is to resurrect several older political artists who were either never highly visible or whose reputations have diminished in the artistic circles of the early 21st century. These include Leon Carlin (dates unknown); Isac Friedlander (1890-1968); Giacomo Patri (1898-1978); Clare Leighton (1898-1989); Iver Rose (1899-1972); Richard Correll (1904-1990); Herman Volz (1904-1990): Jacob Burck (1907-1982); Charles Surendorf (1906-1979); and Paul Weller (1912-2000). Unambiguously, these artists should be more recognized and celebrated for their exemplary socially conscious visual contributions, but the mainstream art world has traditionally eschewed political subjects in favor of the marketplace.

A few of these efforts deserve recognition in this review beyond their inclusion in the volume itself–admittedly a highly subjective selection. Giacomo Patri, an Italian-born San Francisco artist, produced a magnificent graphic novel entitled White Collar in 1938 that chronicled the plight of white collar workers thrown into unemployment through institutional breakdown and no fault of their own. In Figure 3, the man visits a pawnshop to pawn a valued family possession. This was common at the time and remains so now. Viewers can imagine the pain and humiliation of this event, an emotional consequence of poverty that usually evades the consciousness of those fortunate enough to escape the hardships of unemployment or economic dislocation–then and now.

Figure 3

Iver Rose produced a lithograph entitled “Bread Line” (Figure 4) in 1935, an all too familiar sight during the Depression. Many artists of that era, including Reginald Marsh, Dorothea Lange, Raphael Soyer, and others used their talents to record the grim human realities they witnessed daily. In this work, Rose draws on her knowledge and skill in the cubist tradition to reveal the immense pattern of despair. Here, the men waiting for a handout snake around in a seemingly revolving circle, depicting an unyielding pattern of hunger. That these scenes exist in both rural and urban America in 2011 suggests the uncanny accuracy of her artistic and social vision.

Figure 4

Herman Volz’s lithograph from 1938, “Lockout” (Figure 5), shows several factory workers standing idle after being displaced from their jobs by a predatory employer probably seeking to break union solidarity. The very starkness of the image reflects the precariousness of organized labor at the time. It is surely significant to compare it with the present, when organized labor is under unprecedented attack, especially by retrograde governors and legislators in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere who have attempted to withdraw historic collective bargaining rights from working women and men. Volz’s WPA sponsored artwork of almost 75 years ago has a stunning if depressing relevance to the present.

Figure 5

Art Hazelwood has interspersed this book with numerous socially oriented works from contemporary visual artists. Many have achieved wide recognition and continue to use their prodigious talents to engage, even incite viewers to critical consciousness and social action. Longtime Berkeley artist/activist Eric Drooker (1958- ), for example, has frequently used his artworks to illustrate newspapers and magazines. In this 1995 painting, “Under Bridges” (Figure 6), he depicts a familiar sight, not only in New York City, but also throughout the entire country. Two homeless men are warming themselves under a bridge with a fire in an empty oil barrel or similar container. Whether it is snow falling in New York or rainfall in Los Angeles or dust in Phoenix, the human reality is the same: these are the pariahs of society and it matters little whether economists have declared the recession formally over or not. Hundreds of thousands or more struggle for existence, regardless of GNP growth and marginal declines in unemployment rates. Ironically, Drooker’s image graced the cover of the New Yorker Magazine, a rare appearance of a sharply critical artwork in an establishment periodical.

Figure 6

Christine Hanlon (1954-) created a cityscape variation that likewise reflects the realities of contemporary urban America. This painting, “Third Street Corridor” (Figure 7), reveals two men, one who pulls a shopping cart (the now ubiquitous symbol of homelessness) and the other who pushes a larger container. The latter appears full of recyclables gathered from multiple sources. This is an extremely familiar sight. Modern day gleaners struggle to gather aluminum cans, cardboard boxes, and other items to sell for a mere pittance, to purchase a few of life’s necessities only to repeat the process the following day. Hanlon’s work reveals that reality perceptively; like her predecessors from the Great Depression,she holds a window to a society that prefers to avoid confronting its darker realities.

Figure 7

The history of socially critical art has always contained a satirical strain and this book contains a few remarkable examples. Especially powerful is a mixed media painting by Jos Sances(1952-), entitled “Holiday Home” (Figure 8). Here, Sances offers a parody of one of the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, the so-called “painter of light,” whose mushy and romanticized artworks are the polar opposite of the tradition presented in Hobos to Street People. “Holiday Home” replicates one of Kinkade’s “classic” images in the background: a large house, an affluent neighborhood, prosperous people celebrating, and a well decorated Christmas tree in front – the ideal holiday. But, of course, the homeless man with all his possessions in the shopping cart in the front belies this romanticized vision and instead reminds viewers that millions do not and can not live in such luxurious surroundings. For them, Christmas is no different from any of the other 364 days of the year – a relentless and degrading struggle for survival.
From the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Great Recession of the present , artists have served as the conscience of humanity. This book and the exhibition it represents continue that honorable tradition demand wide attention and corrective social action. Above all, these provocative artworks must galvanize people to realize that poverty and homelessness are not acceptable in a land that proclaims justice while ignoring and demeaning millions of our fellow men, women, and children who live among us and who will not go away.

Figure 8