Revisiting If You Lived Here: Lecture and Conversation with Martha Rosler

Join us for a lecture by artist Martha Rosler on her landmark project If You Lived Here (1989). Artist Alex Strada will be in conversation with Rosler exploring some of the lessons carried forward into Strada’s current project, Public Address, presented by Storefront for Art and Architecture and currently on view across the city. Together, they will reflect on Rosler’s decades-long engagement with housing, public space, and community—inviting reflection on how questions raised over thirty years ago continue to shape socially engaged artistic practice, and the way we think about housing insecurity, home and belonging today.

Public Address is a citywide public art project presented by Storefront with Strada, the Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services. The project transforms writings and drawings by people living in New York City shelters into public street sign installations — emerging from multilingual log-writing workshops Strada holds in shelters across the city, where residents and frontline staff turn an administrative record-keeping tool into a space for reflection, testimony, and communication with the broader public.

In her work and her writing, Martha Rosler has explored discourses of housing, architecture, and the built environment, from a feminist perspective. Investigations of domestic life, and of public spaces, roads, and gardens and other transformations of the natural and the biological underlie the work that she classifies as landscape. 

Martha Rosler’s landmark three-show cycle, If You Lived Here…, was first shown in 1989 at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, concurrently with a Times Square animated billboard, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, entitled Housing Is a Human Right. In subsequent years, the exhibition, or portions of it, was reinstituted, along with its ever-growing archive, at 21 further locations: the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Washington University, St. Louis; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (UK); The Generali Foundation, Vienna; Nederland Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; Ormeau Baths, Belfast; The Courtauld Institute, London; the Taipei Biennial; University of Rennes; e-flux Gallery, NY; Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht; La Virreina Centre de l’Image, Barcelona; Tate Liverpool; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Kunst Raum Riehen, Basel; The New Foundation, Seattle; The Temporary Office of Urban Disturbances, NY; and most recently at the Glasgow Women’s Library (2021) and Maxxi, Rome (2024). Housing Is a Human Right has been shown at several international locales, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.