Public Address by Alex Strada

New York City remains the only municipality in the United States to guarantee the right to shelter, a commitment established through decades of advocacy and litigation. Public Address, conceived by artist Alex Strada, is a citywide public artwork that centers the lived experience of those most impacted by housing insecurity. The project establishes a dialogue with New York City, affirming access to temporary shelter as a basic right while also exposing the limits of such provision in addressing deeper crises of affordability, displacement, and care.

Strada is the inaugural Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Public Address builds on three years of collaborative log-writing workshops hosted by Strada in shelters across the city. In this exhibition, handwritten reflections by shelter residents and frontline staff are translated onto upcycled aluminum street signs fabricated by the Department of Transportation’s Sign Shop. Transforming the bureaucratic tool of the logbook and the language of city infrastructure into public art, these signs invite public dialogues about housing insecurity, migration, caregiving, and resistance. Over 300 participants have contributed so far, with new entries continually integrated as the project expands.

During the run of the exhibition, five large-scale installations—one per borough—will rotate through city parks. First debuting in Manhattan in October 2025, the main installation is now in Brooklyn’s Columbus Park. Small signs are installed on city lampposts and driverails all throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Each sign represents the community districts of the two boroughs with one sign placed in each district. Over the course of 2026, the project will grow and iterate across city parks and streets.

By embedding testimony within the visual and spatial codes of the city, the project amplifies voices too often excluded from public discourse while foregrounding ways in which civic infrastructures can be reimagined as platforms for listening. Most importantly, the project’s public presence offers unhoused people and staff an unprecedented space for their voices to be centered and heard. Within Public Works, Strada’s intervention exemplifies how artistic practice can inhabit and unsettle the shifting terrain of civic life in New York.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan and Will Watts, Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy at Coalition for the Homeless, join Strada for a conversation on the state of homelessness in New York City. Egan, Strada, and Watts share their own experiences of working with unhoused individuals amidst this legal decree, along with the need for supportive housing, and the ways these struggles intersect with broader questions of who has the right to the city.

In this intimate encounter with a multi-year, participatory art project, leading voices on issues of housing and homelessness, migration, the arts and civic life will read and respond to the log entries on view. Guest readers are scholar Alexandra Délano Alonso, architect Nandini Bagchee, Arash Diba of VOCAL-NY, artist Pablo Helguera, author Suketu Mehta, Eva Raison, Director of Brooklyn Public Library’s Outreach Services. community organizer and educator Rob Robinson, organizer Maria Ponce Sevilla, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), and author Samuel Stein. The readings will be accompanied by an artist-led walkthrough of the installation and its movement across the city.

The project is the first in a series of off-site commissions titled Public Works by artists Alex Strada, David L. Johnson, and Rose Salane, whose work each responds to the erosion—and reinvention—of civic infrastructures in New York City. These projects will examine how the vulnerability of public institutions and non-governmental organizations that have traditionally served as mediators in civic life can open a space for artists to engage and address, providing both critique and alternatives to systemic shortcomings.

Alex Strada is an artist and educator based in New York City whose work spans installation, film/video, sound and orality, printed media, participatory workshops, and public practice. Through a research-based approach grounded in transdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement, her projects reimagine systems of power and create platforms for collectivity, civic agency, and political transformation. Since 2022, she has served as the Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Recent solo exhibitions include the Queens Museum, NYC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, CT; Times Square Arts, NYC; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Strada has received grants from the Graham Foundation, Artadia, NYFA, NYSCA, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, BOMB, New York Times, Hyperallergic, and on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. She holds an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Strada is the Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow and faculty at the Pratt Institute.

This public artwork is made possible through the joint support of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Department of Transportation Art program, Department of Homeless Services, Department of Social Services and Department of Parks & Recreation. Storefront gratefully acknowledges the invaluable support of the Mellon Foundation, Teiger Foundation, the Brendan & Helen Bechtel Foundation and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; public funds form the New York state Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the invaluable generosity of Storefront’s Board of Directors, the Storefront Circle, Storefront members and individual donors. 

The artist extends heartfelt gratitude to Erica Dean and Beatriz Fritzchler for their guidance and support throughout the development of this project. Deep appreciation also goes to Tei Carpenter, Commonpoint Queens, Joslyn Carter, Megan Duffy, Teresa Frappaolo, Alex Gallitano, Aaron Landsman, Elizabeth Masella, Shannon Mattern, Esther Nguyen, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Brian Paul, Michael Pizzo, Michael Riga, Arielle Torres, Diya Vij, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Jaclyn Whitney, and Cafewal by EVLOVESNYC, who provided food during the project’s debut in 2025.