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Starting next month, “Public Address” will be on view in Joyce Kilmer Park and other locations across the Bronx, which is home to more homeless shelters than any other borough. The art project draws on handwritten testimony from hundreds of unhoused New Yorkers and shelter workers.
Starting next month, a public art installation will feature handwritten testimony and drawings created by homeless New Yorkers, displayed on aluminum street signs at more than a dozen locations throughout the Bronx.
“Public Address” by artist Alex Strada, “seeks to amplify the voices of people living and working in shelters,” according to an announcement Tuesday from the Department of Homeless Services and Department of Cultural Affairs, which is spearheading the project alongside The Bronx Museum and the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
The main installation will be on view starting Sept. 14 at Joyce Kilmer Park, while smaller versions will go up at additional locations across the borough—one in every Bronx community district. The signs were created by the city’s Department of Transportation out of recycled aluminum street signs, and will feature writing and art by homeless shelter residents and staffers.
More then 400 people contributed to the effort during a series of workshops Strada hosted in shelters over the course of four years, officials said. Their handwritten and hand-drawn entries deal with “homelessness, housing advocacy, migration, caregiving, displacement, and other dimensions of life within and beyond the shelter system,” according to a press release.
The installation “asks us to reconsider what a public space can hold, and whose voices we expect to encounter within it,” Shamim M. Momin, Bronx Museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement Tuesday.
Previous versions of the installation were displayed last year and earlier this spring in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the exhibit will head to Staten Island next before culminating in Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park in March 2027.
But its display in the Bronx has particular significance, officials said, since the borough is home to the greatest number of homeless shelters.
More than 100,000 people stay in the city’s shelter system each month, as New York faces a mounting affordability crisis fueled by a housing shortage. Still, the city has the lowest share of unsheltered or street homeless people in the nation, thanks to its unique “right to shelter” protections that require a bed for anyone who needs it.
“There have been a lot of challenges with being homeless, but I have learned a lot of useful skills to help me get through living in a shelter,” said one sign displayed as part of the exhibit, featuring a handwritten dispatch from a New Yorker named Destined, who wrote that they’d been unhoused for five years.
“There are worse places than this,” another sign, submitted anonymously, reads. “I want to someday move to my own place.” Others include drawings by children, more than 28,000 of whom slept in city shelters this week, data shows.
“This project creates a unique opportunity for New Yorkers to better understand what homelessness truly looks like in the city,” Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Erin Dalton said in a statement.
Find a map of the planned Bronx installation locations here. A free public program to celebrate the exhibit will take place at Joyce Kilmer Park on Sept. 23.
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