As I made my manner up the winding path to DeKalb Gallery, a squat aquarium of a constructing on the Pratt Institute quad in Brooklyn, I may 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 extensive open. Inside, I noticed arrays of footwear 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 Assist 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 assets straight. The present argues that caring for unhoused and dispossessed folks isn’t a activity to be sloughed off to the “city,” that nebulous and sometimes ineffective entity, however reasonably 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 College of Info 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 the next density in a sure group 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 fee, or the share of housing that’s unoccupied, reveals that the overbuilding of luxurious flats in wealthier elements of Manhattan correlates carefully with these areas with fewer shelters and extra calls.
Set up view of Alex Strada, Collective Mobilities (picture Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
A strong model of this mapping undertaking can also be freely accessible on-line, together with layers damaged down by race, share of important employees, and poverty fee, increasing the bodily and temporal parameters of Collective Mobilities. This type of porosity between the present itself and its true topic — the town and other people exterior — will also be felt within the materials of the exhibition. The shapes of those maps mirror the irregular silhouette of the cell sculptures, that are in flip primarily based on the Brooklyn skyline, as sketched out by Strada throughout walks all through the neighborhood. These Mutual Assist 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 coloration schemes are saturated with out being facile or condescending; they invite consideration, reasonably than a downward gaze. Their mirrored surfaces mirror the road and its passersby, inducing curiosity and probably participation, and likewise enable folks to attempt on the clothes and see how they give the impression of being in them. Extra essentially, they argue that this very motion — of having the ability to select, reasonably than simply being grateful to be clothed in any respect — is essential. With Collective Mobilities, Strada argues that aesthetic care and dignity are usually not rewards for attaining primary wants, however one thing to be present in that dispensation. That artwork is able to finishing up that duty, and it’s a stupendous factor.
A customer holding the enormous bolts that join Alex Strada’s Mutual Assist Mobiles (2025)
Set up view of one of many maps on the wall in Alex Strada, Collective Mobilities (picture Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Alex Strada, Collective Mobilities (picture Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Alex Strada, Mutual Assist Cell sculptures seen exterior (picture courtesy the artist)
Folks utilizing Alex Strada’s Mutual Assist Cell sculptures (picture 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.
