As I made my approach up the winding path to DeKalb Gallery, a squat aquarium of a constructing on the Pratt Institute quad in Brooklyn, I might inform that Collective Mobilities could be an uncommon present. An indication very like one you’d discover on a nook deli proclaimed, “We’re Open.” On a gentle February afternoon, one of many doorways was flung huge open. Inside, I noticed arrays of sneakers and baggage neatly organized on tarps; clear bins of folded garments and baggage crammed with stuffed animals and undergarments; towering constructions in teal, navy, and ochre hues; and a determine weaving out and in of all of the above, folding, rearranging, and organizing the wares.
That determine is the artist, Alex Strada, who’s a Pratt fellow and the general public artist in residence with the New York Metropolis Division of Homeless Companies and Division of Cultural Affairs. These aforementioned constructions are Mutual Help Cell sculptures, which Strada designed with architect Ekin Bilal and which Yasunari Izaki fabricated at Pratt’s woodshop. All through the exhibition, guests are inspired to donate clothes and important gadgets; on Saturdays, Strada wheels the sculptures to close by shelters to distribute these sources straight. The present argues that caring for unhoused and dispossessed individuals is just not a activity to be sloughed off to the “city,” that nebulous and infrequently ineffective entity, however fairly a duty to be shouldered by a collectivity of people.
Considerably unusually for an artwork exhibition, one of many keystones of Collective Mobilities is a sequence of paper maps pinned to the wall. Made with Pratt Faculty of Data professor John Lauermann and graduate assistants Yuanhao Wu and Nathan Smash, they inform a story of individualism made colossally and cruelly manifest on a metropolis scale. One map plots shelter areas with a darkish blue conveying a better density in a sure neighborhood district and lightweight blue denoting decrease. It’s instantly obvious that sure districts, such because the one encompassing the Bronx’s Highbridge neighborhood, maintain disproportionately extra shelters than others, like that of Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, which has zero. Transfer onto the following map, which plots non-emergency 311 calls associated to homelessness, and the correlation between areas with fewer shelters and excessive numbers of experiences comes into sharp focus. One other chart documenting emptiness price, or the proportion of housing that’s unoccupied, reveals that the overbuilding of luxurious residences in wealthier components of Manhattan correlates intently with these areas with fewer shelters and extra calls.
Set up view of Alex Strada, Collective Mobilities (photograph Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
A sturdy model of this mapping venture can also be freely out there on-line, together with layers damaged down by race, share of important employees, and poverty price, increasing the bodily and temporal parameters of Collective Mobilities. This sort of porosity between the present itself and its true topic — town and other people exterior — may also be felt within the materials of the exhibition. The shapes of those maps mirror the irregular silhouette of the cellular sculptures, that are in flip based mostly on the Brooklyn skyline, as sketched out by Strada throughout walks all through the neighborhood. These Mutual Help Mobiles marry magnificence and performance, playfulness and pragmatism. They subvert the aesthetic codes that New Yorkers unconsciously perceive — the identical sixth sense that prickles the pores and skin on the sight of a police uniform, or might compel us to avert our eyes from somebody asking for change, tacitly denying an acknowledgment that they exist in any respect.
These sculptures’ deliberate colour schemes are saturated with out being facile or condescending; they invite consideration, fairly than a downward gaze. Their mirrored surfaces replicate the road and its passersby, inducing curiosity and probably participation, and in addition permit individuals to attempt on the clothes and see how they give the impression of being in them. Extra basically, they argue that this very motion — of having the ability to select, fairly than simply being grateful to be clothed in any respect — is necessary. With Collective Mobilities, Strada argues that aesthetic care and dignity aren’t rewards for attaining fundamental wants, however one thing to be present in that dispensation. That artwork is able to finishing up that duty, and it’s a wonderful factor.
A customer holding the enormous bolts that join Alex Strada’s Mutual Help Mobiles (2025)
Set up view of one of many maps on the wall in Alex Strada, Collective Mobilities (photograph Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Alex Strada, Collective Mobilities (photograph Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Alex Strada, Mutual Help Cell sculptures seen exterior (photograph courtesy the artist)
Folks utilizing Alex Strada’s Mutual Help Cell sculptures (photograph courtesy the artist)
Collective Mobilities continues at DeKalb Gallery at Pratt Institute (331 Dekalb Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn) by March 9. The exhibition was organized by the artist.
