A Place to Call Home: Public Art as a Tool for Housing Advocacy

Abstract

On a normal day in Philadelphia, about 4,000 people are homeless, and over the course of a year, more than 3,500 young people resort to sleeping in an emergency shelter (Children’s Work Group 2010). Public health researchers have clearly documented a range of adverse health effects associated with housing insecurity and homelessness, including threats to mental, physical and social wellbeing (Bassuk 1997; Rouse 2009; Weinreb 1998; Ma 2008; Perlman 2010).

The artists and educators of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program (MAP) saw first-hand how this social problem affected the high-risk youth they serve in art education and life skills training programs. Over and over again, the MAP team recognized that their youth got into trouble—dropping out of school, not showing up for work, getting involved with the juvenile justice system—when their access to stable housing was threatened.

Committed to improving the lives of young people facing housing insecurity, MAP developed the arts and advocacy initiative: A Place to Call Home. A multidisciplinary team of artists, researchers, public servants, community members, the press, a real estate developer and, most importantly, 48 high-risk youth participating in Mural Arts programs, came together to create a mission statement that would define the path ahead:

Our mission is to engage and empower Philadelphia youth in order to understand how home, as they define it, contributes to—or takes from—their sense of wellbeing. In addition, we will increase awareness of how Philadelphia’s socioeconomic diversity contributes to the health and life chances of the city’s residents. These goals will be achieved through photo-documentation, storytelling, and art-making.

Over the course of six months, the MAP project team acted together on this mission, under the direction of Shari Hersh and lead artists Ernel Martinez, Shira Walinsky and Damon Reaves. The team adopted a systematic approach that included photo-documentation and photo-elicitation interviewing to organize this expansive collaboration (Cannuscio 2009). The first step was to photographically document housing conditions along Spruce Street, a major corridor cutting through the city, from Cobbs Creek to the Delaware River, adhering to a strict protocol. These photos generated team discussions regarding how housing conditions vary across the city’s socioeconomic gradient. Second, we gave cameras to the 48 high-risk youth and asked them to explore and document what home means to them from their “insider” perspective. Third, a group of researchers and newly trained artists and undergraduate students interviewed the youths, using each young person’s own insider images of home as the basis for photo-elicitation interviews. The interviews focused on the young people’s highly personal experiences of home and, in some cases, homelessness (Cannuscio 2012).