As I made my way up the winding path to DeKalb Gallery, a squat aquarium of a building on the Pratt Institute quad in Brooklyn, I could tell that Collective Mobilities would be an unusual show. A sign much like one you’d find on a corner deli proclaimed, “We’re Open.” On a mild February afternoon, one of the doors was flung wide open. Inside, I saw arrays of shoes and bags neatly arranged on tarps; clear bins of folded clothes and bags filled with stuffed animals and undergarments; towering structures in teal, navy, and ochre hues; and a figure weaving in and out of all the above, folding, rearranging, and organizing the wares.
That figure is the artist, Alex Strada, who’s a Pratt fellow and the public artist in residence with the New York City Department of Homeless Services and Department of Cultural Affairs. Those aforementioned structures are Mutual Aid Mobile sculptures, which Strada designed with architect Ekin Bilal and which Yasunari Izaki fabricated at Pratt’s woodshop. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to donate clothing and essential items; on Saturdays, Strada wheels the sculptures to nearby shelters to distribute these resources directly. The show argues that caring for unhoused and dispossessed people is not a task to be sloughed off to the “city,” that nebulous and often ineffective entity, but rather a responsibility to be shouldered by a collectivity of individuals.
Somewhat unusually for an art exhibition, one of the keystones of Collective Mobilities is a series of paper maps pinned to the wall. Made with Pratt School of Information professor John Lauermann and graduate assistants Yuanhao Wu and Nathan Smash, they tell a tale of individualism made colossally and cruelly manifest on a city scale. One map plots shelter locations with a dark blue conveying a higher density in a certain community district and light blue denoting lower. It’s immediately apparent that certain districts, such as the one encompassing the Bronx’s Highbridge neighborhood, hold disproportionately more shelters than others, like that of Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, which has zero. Move onto the next map, which plots non-emergency 311 calls related to homelessness, and the correlation between areas with fewer shelters and high numbers of reports comes into sharp focus. Another chart documenting vacancy rate, or the percentage of housing that is unoccupied, reveals that the overbuilding of luxury apartments in wealthier parts of Manhattan correlates closely with those regions with fewer shelters and more calls.
A robust version of this mapping project is also freely available online, including layers broken down by race, percentage of essential workers, and poverty rate, expanding the physical and temporal parameters of Collective Mobilities. This kind of porosity between the show itself and its true subject — the city and people outside — can also be felt in the material of the exhibition. The shapes of these maps mirror the irregular silhouette of the mobile sculptures, which are in turn based on the Brooklyn skyline, as sketched out by Strada during walks throughout the neighborhood. These Mutual Aid Mobiles marry beauty and function, playfulness and pragmatism. They subvert the aesthetic codes that New Yorkers unconsciously understand — the same sixth sense that prickles the skin at the sight of a police uniform, or may compel us to avert our eyes from someone asking for change, tacitly denying an acknowledgment that they exist at all.
These sculptures’ deliberate color schemes are saturated without being facile or condescending; they invite attention, rather than a downward gaze. Their mirrored surfaces reflect the street and its passersby, inducing curiosity and possibly participation, and also allow people to try on the garments and see how they look in them. More fundamentally, they argue that this very action — of being able to choose, rather than just being grateful to be clothed at all — is important. With Collective Mobilities, Strada argues that aesthetic care and dignity are not rewards for attaining basic needs, but something to be found in that dispensation. That art is capable of carrying out that responsibility, and it’s a beautiful thing.
Collective Mobilities continues at DeKalb Gallery at Pratt Institute (331 Dekalb Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn) through March 9. The exhibition was organized by the artist.
