Top: U-ACT members Tammy Varney (left) and Giovanni Castillo (far right) with Ala Ochumare (center) at an opening reception last week. The show runs at 211 Park St. through Feb. 3. Bottom: Work by Barbara Kalina, whose contributions to the exhibition also include a multi-channel video on loop. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The scene is so familiar, so human, that a viewer can feel it in their body. Pressed up against a wall, a well-loved couch takes up most of the frame, with blocky, dark stripes stretching against its cotton slipcover. On the cushions, there are layers of rumpled sheets and blankets, cotton and fleece, florals and solids. On the wall, the framed art hangs askew, of a piece with matching pink lampshades. Potted plants crowd the outer reaches of the frame, their green and yellow fronds reaching out like long fingers.
There’s a need, unspoken and present all at once: this is a common space and also a hallowed one, because it allows a person to lay their body down and know that they can rest.
The artwork is one of dozens in Art Without A Home, running through February 3 at Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center (colloquially called The House) at 211 Park Street. Curated by artist and organizer Sun Queen, the show is a fierce and deeply moving call to action, asking viewers—housed and unhoused, and across the socioeconomic spectrum—to consider the meaning of housing as a human right at a time when it is often treated as anything but. It is doubly affecting in New Haven, where the city’s continuous housing boom often excludes its most vulnerable residents.
Artists include Barbara Kalina, Catherine LaForza, poet Catherine Yates, Howard Oliver, Jesse Wolf, Lady J the Artist, AG, Ronald Ferrucci, Trangerine, Tyree Hughey, Scott McCall, Sun Queen, Tracey Massey and Yoyo. For Queen, a lifelong New Havener and organizer with the Unhoused Activists Community Team (U-ACT) who lives in the city’s Westville neighborhood, it has taken on additional weight this month, after a “Notice To Quit” showed up on her door.
Top: Artist, activist, curator and organizer Sun Queen. Bottom: Artwork by Jesse Wolf. In thinking about the show, he , aid at the opening Wolf turned to pieces that were inspired by an exhibition of Andy Warhol's work two years ago. "At the time, life was chaotic," Wolf remembered. For a time, he wasn't sure where he was going to live or whether he would have access to housing. So the theme resonated with him. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The document, which tells a resident to “quit” or leave a property by a certain date, is often used by landlords as the first step in an eviction process. Queen, who has lived in the same building for 14 years, felt like the rug had been pulled out from under her when she received it. As an organizer, she’s seen the same pattern happen to Black and Brown New Haveners all around her for years.
“This exhibit is now my testament,” she said at an opening last week, as roughly 100 attendees ate dinner together before seeing the show for themselves. “I will survive, but this is what folks are dealing with every day. It’s not just for folks who are living out in the street, who don’t have employment. I’m employed. I have two degrees. And it happens to us all.”
“My hope is for us to come together in community and stop being in silos, because all these things are interconnected,” she added. “I hope that we come together, stand together, speak together and continue to fight for one another.”
True to her vision, the exhibition is both testament and truth-telling from start to finish. In the building’s second-floor gallery, a collection of multimedia art greets viewers, with works that range from sharp, grayscale photographs on canvas to multi-channel video on loop. There is original poetry, painting, collage and installation art that pushes a viewer to put themselves—literally—in another person’s shoes, lest they believe that access to safe and reliable housing is someone else’s problem. Many of the artists have experienced housing insecurity themselves, lending whole layers of meaning to each work.
In one such grouping, taken by Queen herself, New Haven shifts into focus anew, black and white photographs documenting the people and places caught in the crosshairs of a housing crisis. In one image, taken from below, two people face each other, heavy bags slung over their arms and shoulders. One, at the right, looks down at Queen, acknowledging her presence; the other scrutinizes something in the distance. In the background, a trio walks by, lost in conversation. Further off, cars continue to whiz past as if it’s just another breezy summer day.
Top: Tracey Massey, who has an installation at the entrance to the gallery, at an opening last week. Bottom: Sun Queen's photography in the show.
But nothing about this scene should be normalized: these subjects are housing insecure, and figuring out where they will go in the heart of a city that has not prioritized their need for shelter. Between the two figures, the heavy, double doors of Trinity Church on the Green appear, and with it the full weight of the moment. Here are two people across from a house of worship—meant to exalt a man who loved the poor and cared for the homeless—searching for safe and reliable shelter. The fact that they may not find it feels like sacrilege.
So too in freeze-frames from the Green, from the nearby courthouse, from a boarded-up Walt’s Cleaners on Dixwell Avenue, still waiting for a promised revitalization from the city. Beneath it, two sneakers hang from the high branches of a tree, and there’s the sense that there’s a story there the viewer may never know.
Like so much of documentary and street photography, this approach is nuanced and complex: these subjects, so central to the act of picture-making here, are often the same people most quickly rendered invisible by a system that lets them fall through the cracks. Once a viewer has recognized the space as the Green, it’s hard to look at and not think of the scripture unfolding inside the three churches on Temple Street, the warm meals and full bellies at restaurants just across Chapel, the buses heaving and squeaking on their way through New Haven. It all seems too much just like business as usual.
“I am tired of being told this is how it works,” Queen said during her remarks Tuesday, fighting back tears that eventually came. “As if systems aren’t built by hands, as if laws don’t choose who they bruise, as if policy isn’t a language designed to exhaust the poor into silence.”
Work by the artists Lady J, Jesse Wolf and AG.
Around Queen’s works, that message is delivered in as many ways as there are artists in the show. Beside the grouping of photographs from the Green and downtown New Haven, Lady J the Artist has contributed several of her vibrant paintings, including a pair of sneakers that mirror Queen’s photograph, and a tall, slender pair of hands that hold open the pages of a book, bright, eye-catching butterflies finding a place to land as the subject allows herself to be transported.
Across the room, artist Scott McCall has rendered in pencil the weight of legalese, with a heavy, rubber-soled boot that extends from a judge’s gavel, and threatens to crush a small, curled figure laying on the solid base below. Beside it, a collection of portraits from the artist Tyree Hughey suggest that we must create a kinder world for our young people, because the alternative—which is already the present for so many—is too bleak to imagine. Beside it, viewers can and should stop for a series of oral interviews with residents and organizers at Rosette Village, a collection of tiny homes that has sprung up behind the Amistad Catholic Worker House in the city’s Hill neighborhood.
Down the wall, a viewer can feel those testimonies come alive in a deceptively small sculpture by the artists AG and Yoyo. In the piece, pennies cover a shape made of construction paper, cardboard and popsicle sticks, eye-catching in the sharp contrast of orange, dulled but shiny copper on a field of bright green. At first, it seems like a small piece, easy to miss if you’re going through the exhibition too quickly (which, reader, you should not).
Top: The artist AG. Bottom: The shadow puppet sculpture from AG and Yoyo.
But a second look reveals the work’s genius: a light shining onto the sculpture throws a long shadow of a person in profile onto the wall. They are weighed down by bags on both the back and front of their body, one leg touching down on the ground as the other stands steady. That a viewer can’t see the face is part of the point: this could be any New Havener, including them. The use of a form associated with children’s play and magic-making is especially moving here, turning the idea of make believe and fairy tales entirely on its head.
Back on the other side of the gallery, several vignettes from artist Barbara Kalina may also stop a person in their tracks, telling a story of home and eviction in real time. In one, a figure wedges his body into the open trunk of his car, cradling a cup of coffee as his shoes hang off the edge. Behind him, the minivan is crammed with belongings, suggesting that it is for the moment the only shelter he has. At its lower left, two women stand back-to-back in a narrow, full kitchen, and a viewer suddenly wonders how permanent any of this is.
That’s part of the point, of course: it’s on viewers to realize, as they may in Kalina’s Dear Homeowner series or AG and Yoyo’s shadow puppet or anywhere in between, that very few people are in fact as insulated from the housing crisis as they may think they are. In reality, most viewers here (which is to say, most of us) are likely a few paychecks, eviction letters, or “Notice to Quit” removed from losing their homes. The need to advocate, then, is a collective responsibility that we all share.
Here, Queen’s heart and head (and a sharp curatorial eye, which should surprise no one who has witnessed her organizing work) are very much in concert with each other, with a certain amount of care woven into every nook and cranny of the space. Just outside the gallery’s entrance, two installations face each other, pushing a viewer to action. In one, from the artist Tracey Massey, pairs of boots appear beneath a painting, as if to ask, Where are we going next? Across from them an original poem from Sun Queen sits atop a suitcase, and by a pair of sneakers written with the words Home / Hope / Still Here / Still Trying.
At the far end of the space, meanwhile, is perhaps the exhibition’s most sacred work: an altar dedicated to the vital and transformative work that U-ACT has done, and the beloved members the group has lost. It becomes a chance to remember people like 36-year-old Keith Petrulis and 71-year-old Arthur Taylor, both unhoused activists who, with more reliable access to safe housing, shelter, and transportation, might still be with us in a different present.
That’s equally true of 65-year-old Abdulah Kanchero, who died of hypothermia on the New Haven Green last month. A temporary 24/7 warming center at 200 Orange St., used only for overflow, opened during a week of bitter cold just a day later (it is open again this week).
Around them, there are scenes of those still fighting, chief among them Queen and fellow organizer (and Black Lives Matter New Haven co-founder) Ala Ochumare. And in both worlds, that of the living and that of the departed, there is suddenly a level of resilience that no human should ever have to summon. This, in many ways, drives it all home with a crushing weight, making clear how deeply housing is a basic human right.
Work by Tyree Hughey. Bottom: Artist Howard Oliver with his work.
The show, which uses art as both a doorway and an invitation to get involved in justice work, could not come at a more urgent time. This month, extreme cold has become a near-constant presence in the city, with temperatures that regularly dip below freezing. While the Elicker Administration has in the past three years opened new spaces for unhoused people and families and launched programs like Elm City COMPASS, the need for more humane and robust wraparound services is higher than it’s been in years.
That’s due in part to a whole constellation of issues: cuts to homelessness prevention, healthcare, and food aid on the federal level, New Haven’s own city budget, lack of affordable and subsidized housing in the suburbs; the financial burden that lands on tenants in a city where over 56 percent of property is now tax-exempt. But budgets are moral documents, too: we live in a country that simply doesn’t prioritize the needs of people who are unhoused and housing insecure. In a city with extreme wealth disparity, there's a creeping feeling, affirmed in the show, that it doesn't have to be this way.
Indeed, folks who are unhoused, or risk becoming unhoused, face a larger legal system that is often against them, and a kind of precarious state of survival that can cascade. In the fall of 2024, for instance—well before federal cuts hit emergency food providers—a report on the State of Hunger in New Haven found that 27 percent of New Haveners report experiencing food insecurity. That figure has exploded in the year since President Donald Trump took office. It’s only one of the ways in which hunger, access to care, mental health and wellbeing, and keeping families together are all affected by the basic need for shelter.
An installation by Sun Queen that sits at the gallery's entrance.
“They look down on the homeless and I’m quite sick of it,” said U-ACT member Tammy Varney, who lost her home after the death of her husband in 2023, and has been unable to find stable housing since because she is on a fixed income. “What am I? Just a statistic? Not even a person right now. That’s how they look at me, and I’m sick of it.”
In a panel discussion before attendees headed up to the gallery, Varney spoke openly about the pain of being unable to “even afford a room to live in,” in part because she is disabled, and cannot work at this time. Often, she said, she feels like that’s all people see—instead of a woman who has children and grandchildren in whom she delights, and finds purpose every day.
Beside her, fellow U-ACT member Giovanni Castillo agreed. When he thinks of what he wants people to know, he said, it’s that he is a loving son and father, a dog dad, a “God-fearing man” and a jokester with a wry sense of humor. “I’m a good guy,” he added. “I’m a hero in my book.”
“Home,” he added, “is sometimes a memory.”