[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi.
Welcome, everybody.
Thank you for joining us at today's program.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
I'm the Director of the Wignall Museum,
and I'm happy to introduce you to today's artist talk
with Willie Baronet, presented as part of Collective Care:
Uncovering Poverty.
Collective Care is a collaborative series
of programs developed by the Wignall
Museum, The center for Culture and Social Justice,
and the Panther Care Program.
Impacts from the global pandemic continue
to affect our students and communities
at record-level rates of food and housing insecurity,
affecting the basic needs of millions of Americans,
many of them K-12 and higher education students.
Collective Care: Uncovering Poverty
invites us to connect as we examine these issues together.
Be sure to save the date for future programs.
We'll be sure to include those links in the chat
so you can see those programs.
I want to acknowledge Governing Board member Kathy Brugger, who
I am told was going to join us, although I don't see her
currently, so we'll give her an early shoutout for being here.
I also want to give a shoutout to our Collective Care planning
colleagues, Dr. Leti Romo, Director of Student Equity
and Engagement, and Albert Rodriguez,
Director of the Panther Care Program,
Roman Stollenwerk, Assistant Curator at the Wignall Museum,
and Andy Hadle, Wignall Museum Preparator.
So good to see you all here today.
Before we share some quick housekeeping
and introduce you to Willie, I'd like
to invite Dr. Romo to share our land acknowledgment.
With respect and honor for the lands where
Chaffey College resides and the leaders who came before us,
we'd like to take a moment to acknowledge
the Gabrielino-Tongva peoples, the original stewards
of these sacred and unceded homelands.
The Tongva people's history, languages, cultural traditions,
and legacy continue to shape this region,
and we recognize our continuing presence in their homelands.
In the spirit of truth and equity,
Chaffey College commits to uplifting
the voices of Indigenous peoples,
building an inclusive and equitable
educational environment and decolonizing the institution.
We also encourage members of the Chaffey College community
to learn about the land we reside on
and the original caretakers and advocate for culturally
responsive action.
So, today, I'm so pleased to announce our special guest,
Willie Baronet.
Willie Baronet is a Texas-based artist and educator.
Baronet received his undergraduate degree
from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette
and his MFA in arts and technology
from the University of Texas at Dallas.
The Stan Richards Professor in Creative Advertising
at SMU Meadows School of the Arts, Baronet
has spoken at organizations and schools
across the country about creativity
and his long-term project We Are All Homeless, including
TEDx, CreativeMornings, HOW Design
Conference, among many others.
We Are All Homeless includes the documentary Signs of Humanity,
which is available on Amazon Prime,
and that premiered at the Dallas Film Festival.
The project includes signs from unhoused individuals
that Baronet has paid for and collected since 1993.
His advertising and design work has
been featured in Communication Arts, AIG Graphic Design
Annual, New York Arts Director Annual, The One Show, Print
Casebooks, Annual Report Trends, The Type Directors Club Annual,
and Annual Report Design: A Historical Retrospective,
1510 to 1990, organized by the Cooper Hewitt National
Museum of Design.
So, with that, please join me in giving Willie a warm virtual
welcome.
I want to say thank you to Rebecca.
We've been talking for what seems like decades,
although it's just a few years, about doing something together,
and I'm really excited to be here
and to share a bit about this long-term art project,
We Are All Homeless.
It is a deeply personal journey that I'm going to share,
and I'm looking forward to questions at the end,
but I realize that a lot of this is personal,
but it's part of my own creative journey
in starting this, and then sort of hanging on
to the tail of the dragon, as it has taken me where it will.
So, with that, I will share a bit about the background.
I have been buying and collecting signs,
as Rebecca said, since 1993.
She asked me a little bit earlier about how many signs
I have, and I think that that number is just over 2,000 now.
This sign, which I bought in Dallas quite some time ago,
is, in some ways, emblematic of what
I think the plight of the folks on the street are.
It's really about me seeing them and allowing them to see me.
Signs are sometimes quite serious,
sometimes tell a bit of the story of the person
that I am meeting, and sometimes the signs
are more humorous, "Wife and dog kidnapped by ninjas.
Need money for Kung Fu lessons.
I'd really like that dog back."
This is a sign that I bought in Austin, Texas.
And what I've come to realize is that even the signs that
are humorous, or trying to get attention of passers-by,
there's always a serious human story behind that.
Some of the signs that I'll show you today are over 25 years
old.
Some of the signs I bought as recently as
in the last week or two.
It is a process that I don't think
I'm ever going to stop, now that it's become a part of my life.
I also sometimes get signs from other people these days.
This project has been around long enough
that I now will get a package in the mail
from somebody who bought a sign and wants
to tell me the story of the encounter they
had with that person.
This particular sign was given to me by one of my students,
who bought it from a man also in Austin, Texas.
This is a sign that I bought from a man named
Eddie Dunn in Philadelphia in 2014, 'Something to ponder.
Would if God occasionally visits Earth
disguised as a homeless guy panhandling
to see how charitable we are?
Completely hypothetical, of course."
I'm going to talk more about Eddie
toward the end of this presentation.
His sign stuck with me from the moment I met him,
and I really want to share a little bit about the connection
that he and I now have.
So, I've been buying these signs,
and Rebecca mentioned, I went to grad school,
and it was in 2008 that I started grad school,
and it was then that, you know, I had these signs,
but I started to put them together as art project,
and my professors were very encouraging,
and, in 2009, I did my first ever show of any sort that
use these signs.
And, in addition, you can see there
are signs attached to mirrors.
I was also, at the time, starting
to put digital compilations of pieces of signs together,
and just really exploring what this
could be as an art project, and I
tried lots and lots of things.
These were some of the ones that I ended up showing.
At that same time, while I was in school, one of my classmates
was going around and photographing places where
people actually were sleeping.
This is under an overpass in Dallas, Texas,
under one of the busiest highways,
and that was my first time to do that sort of exploration.
For me, grad school was a chance to really dive deeper
into this project and learn more about it.
I toured most of the homeless facilities in Dallas,
learned a lot about what they were doing.
As I continued to do art exhibits,
I realized that the power of the signs was evident,
and that there wasn't much I needed to do.
So, the more I got into this, the more
I stayed out of the way and just found an artful way
to put the signs in front of people.
What I realized is the signs, in real life,
are often in front of a person, and so people aren't always
comfortable making eye contact or engaging with that person,
but the signs in exhibits were not,
and people were able to lean in.
So I just continued to do exhibits.
Sometimes they were on the wall.
Sometimes they were on floors.
This was an abandoned house in Dallas.
So this was in a gallery, and, you know,
I was always finding ways to install
the signs in a way that seemed to make sense in the space.
This was from an exhibit in Michigan just a few years ago,
and it was one of two times that I actually
spelled the word "us" as part of the exhibit.
Some of my favorite exhibits have
been venues that allowed me to suspend
the signs in the space, where they sit there and slowly spin
around, and then people can experience
walking among the signs.
That's not always possible, but it
is one of the favorite things I love
about installing these signs.
And the process, for me, is meditative.
You know, it's physically exhausting sometimes, but,
depending on the space--
This represents four installations.
One is in New York, one is in Texarkana, one is in Louisiana,
and one was in Anchorage, Alaska, which I'll show you
a little more about as well.
All of these exhibits, in the beginning,
led me to share about this in a few different venues.
This is an image from one of the first TEDx
Talks about this project.
And I show this photo of my dad and I
because it was the first time I was connecting
my own upbringing to the idea of what is home,
and what is it that home represents?
I had a very tumultuous relationship
with my father, who was physically abusive,
and he and I didn't really start to repair that relationship
until I was well into adulthood.
But, for me, home was connected to safety,
and that is something that started back in--
I think this was 2011, at the time I did this talk,
and it has continued to evolve as I've asked a lot more people
about what home means to them.
What I didn't talk about at that time
was my relationship with my mother,
which came into play in relation to this project much later.
She passed away in 2003, and never
really got to see this project become the project it's become.
She knew I was collecting signs, but I
do lots of strange things, and I think she just kind of always
looked at me, and shook her head, and was like,
what's wrong with him?
But I'll talk more about that.
It sort of ties into my discussion
about Eddie Dunn, which I'll talk about toward the end
as well.
But it was during that first TEDx Talk
that I first broached the idea of traveling across the United
States, buying signs along the way, and what I didn't realize
was that that was going to culminate
in the creation of a feature-length documentary.
But it was a long process of planning,
and the actual experience Itself is certainly
going to go down as one of the great experiences in my life.
It was 31 days of buying signs in 22 different cities.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit
about that experience by starting with some of the signs
that we bought along the way.
One of the first signs was this one,
"Sugar mama needed," which was in Seattle,
our very first stop.
This was from a young woman in San Francisco.
This was one of the signs we bought in Philadelphia.
It was right outside of Philadelphia,
and I bought it from a man who was
living in a tent with his wife.
This was from a man in Chicago, who was
living under Clinton Bridge.
I think you will probably see a clip of him later on.
One of my favorite signs from Los Angeles
came from this man who was, I would have guessed,
in his mid-70s, and clearly had a sense of humor.
And, again, even the funny signs have a not-so-funny backstory.
He was not willing to be interviewed
for our documentary, but we did chat for a few minutes.
One of my favorite scenes from the trip across the country
was this simple sign.
It simply says, "Spare change."
Part of what stands out to me is that the actual lettering
is done with a ballpoint pen, and I can almost
feel the angst and pain in that lettering.
I'm going to show you a photo of the man I bought this from,
whose name was Michael, and he was in Las Vegas,
and I'll show you his image in a little while.
And, for me, it's the disparity between him
and this sign that really stood out.
Some of the people we met traveling across the country,
in Portland, I met this man named Owen, who
had very, very creative signs.
He told me he arrived in Portland
with over 60 different colored sharpies, which he'd given away
to a lot of his friends on the street,
and he was taking care of this man, whose name is Paulie.
Paulie, like many of the people on the streets--
I've come to learn it's over a third
of the people on the street suffer
from various types of mental illness.
I think, in some communities, that percentage is much higher.
Paulie would just start screaming randomly, and Owen
and told me that, no matter what he
was given, whether it was money, pizza, cigarettes,
whatever, he would share it with Paulie,
and I often wonder what the plight would
be of some of the folks on the streets
if it wasn't for the people looking out for them.
This was a man I met in San Francisco whose name was Neal.
His homeless sign was written on an envelope from the VA.
He was a veteran.
His wife had recently passed away.
When I asked if I could take a photo of him,
he wanted me to show him holding this booklet he had of music.
Apparently, he was writing, I think it was an opera,
and I don't know anything about music,
so I couldn't evaluate it.
But he and I walked together probably for 20 minutes or so.
He was toting an oxygen tank with him.
And, yeah, I'll just never forget that cool San Francisco
evening, walking with him.
This was a young man I met in Denver
whose name was Chaz Kyle.
He was hanging out with a friend of his,
who you will see later in a clip as well.
And they did not want much of the interview
to be on camera, because they were telling us
about life hopping trains, which was
another subculture that I've come to learn a little bit
about.
Dinell, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I think,
was the oldest person I bought a sign from.
At the time, she was 78 years old.
She was living in a park with her son
and two, cats and the main reason
she said she was living outdoors was
there were no shelters in Albuquerque that
allowed for pets.
And in the documentary, she talks
about wanting to start her own organization,
called "Pets with People," that would allow people with pets
to have a place to stay who are on the streets.
I met Michael in Omaha, probably one of the people
who had the biggest emotional impact on me.
Part of it was he had one leg.
He was a veteran, a Vietnam veteran.
He told me a little bit about that experience.
He also was on the street with a group
of people who were sharing resources with each other.
And while we were filming, he had
to adjust his prosthetic leg, and there
was something about just the connection I had with him
that really stirred me up.
My wife passed away of breast cancer.
I had no insurance.
i couldn't keep the mortgage up, and it was just
a matter of time.
You know, you wake up one morning,
and you've got the sheriff putting the tape on your door,
saying you have to leave today.
I'm just so thankful my children are grown, because, you know,
what would I do out here if I had my three boys
and they were still eight, nine, and 10 years old.
What would I do?
Yeah, I feel like there's no end.
I mean, I know there is.
Some days you feel hopeless, some days you don't.
My philosophy on life is, if you wake up,
that should be the hardest part of your day, when you wake up.
The rest of the day should be easy,
because the good Lord is giving you another day to do whatever.
Yeah, there's days you feel hopeless and trapped,
but then there's days you feel hope,
and you think that maybe you're going to turn the corner.
I like to show that clip of Robert
because, in a lot of ways, he represented
a pretty typical encounter with older men
that I met on the street.
This is Cheryl.
I met Cheryl in Detroit, and when I drove up to her,
she was sitting on a milk crate, holding her sign.
When I asked if I could buy her sign, like a lot of people,
she was a little skeptical at first,
like, why do you want my sign, and I told her
it was for an art project.
She asked how much.
I said, "How much would you sell it for?"
She kind of eyed me up and down and said, "$15."
And when I said, "Sure," and I handed her the $15,
she reached into the car and hugged my neck.
And to this day, its the first and only person
who has ever done that.
I was grateful we got to interview her
for the documentary.
She was very authentic, and she talked about the hustle
of being on the street.
This is the man, Michael, whose sign I was mentioning earlier,
from Las Vegas.
Michael struck me as somebody who could be a movie star.
He just had a beautiful presence about him.
He was very soft-spoken, very, very dirty.
Clearly, hadn't been able to clean himself in a long time,
but very thoughtful, and I was really grateful
that he was willing to talk to us on camera for this.
The youngest person that we met on this trip with a sign
was Elli, who is in the front here.
She's Romanian.
She was a refugee with her family.
They were trying to get asylum, so that she
can stay here and go to school.
Unfortunately, that didn't work out,
and she since has had to go back to Romania,
now has two children.
I am in touch with her every so often, through Facebook,
mostly.
And the last time I heard from her,
she was back in the United States, in Florida,
and is still trying to find a way to get an education.
At this time, she was in Baltimore,
and we spent quite a bit of time talking to her,
and the woman to her left was sort of looking out
for her on the streets.
But Ellli spoke five languages, just blew me away
at how intelligent and how full of promise that she was.
The last person that I'll show you from this trip was Nigel.
We met him on the very last day of our trip in New York City.
He had been displaced to New York
from Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina.
He wants to be a journalist.
And just a really sweet young man.
He's another person who I've stayed a little bit in touch
with, you know, in a spotty way.
I will get an email from him every so often.
He was in Philadelphia a couple of years ago,
and the last time I heard from him, he was back in New York.
I've tried to arrange to meet him in New York,
but that hadn't happened again since I
bought his sign in 2014.
The part of the project that I want to talk about the most
was the part that has surprised me,
and that's the ripples, the impact,
the effect that it has had not just on me, but on people
that I've encountered, and that's showed up
in lots of different ways, large and small.
And part of the reason I share this is, often, with students
and with other folks, I am often trying
to get people to realize that, no matter
how strange your idea might be, whatever creative impulse you
have, I want to nurture that in people, because I think
it might surprise a lot of folks as to the kind of impact
they might have.
One of those ways has clearly been
doing exhibits, which I've done all over the country
and the UK, and I'm in the process
of putting a presentation just of all the exhibits together.
I think it's between 60 and 70 so far.
These are a few of the ones that I am sharing right now.
In the lower left, you see the Anchorage Museum.
That was the most recent one, right before COVID,
and I'll show some images of that later on.
This is a stop motion from the single exhibit
that had the most viewers.
Over 300,000 people went through this exhibit in Michigan
a couple of years back.
And, as you can see, it's an awkward place to do an exhibit.
There were all sorts of things in the hallway
of this convention center, but it's the biggest
in terms of audience.
The other aspect of impact has come through media.
A lot of this really took off while we were
traveling across the country.
We started to get contacted in almost every city
that we arrived in.
People wanted to follow us around
or write about the project as we were buying signs.
Sometimes it was a TV station, or radio station,
or a newspaper.
And about halfway through the trip,
I believe we were in Minneapolis,
one of the stories that was written
got picked up by the Associated Press,
and that just exponentially drove attention
all over the country.
I think, at that point, that story
was featured in 4,000 different outlets across the country.
We were on the front page of Reddit for a period of time,
which I didn't know what that meant,
but my students were blowing up my phone
to tell me that that was a big deal.
And as we continued, one of the things that happened was I
did an interview on All Things Considered for NPR,
and a woman based in Philadelphia
happened to hear that interview.
She contacted me.
It turns out she is the head of public health at UPenn,
at the time.
And so we collaborated.
She asked if I would send her a PDF of the signs.
She wanted to do a research project anecdotally
analyzing the content of the signs, which she did,
and then that was subsequently published in the American
Journal of Public Health.
She and I became good friends.
We did a number of projects together.
The next research thing that was published
was just this past year.
I went to meet with her and her grad students.
Now she's the head of public health at Thomas Jefferson
University in Philadelphia.
And we did a week-long project with her grad students
buying signs, and then I would introduce the person
that I bought the sign from to the grad students,
and if they gave permission, they did an interview
with them, and they were putting research together
about, specifically, the problem of homelessness
in Philadelphia.
They have published an article under the title
"Even a Smile Helps," which was based on this sign
that you see right here, and the article
has been published in the International
Journal of Social Psychiatry.
I'm currently working with Dr. Rosie Frasso and her colleagues
about another project that's going to hopefully happen
in the spring of 2022, and we are
going to try to do another project that
is going to research and track how empathy
changes in students when they are working on projects
like this.
I am not a researcher, although I've now gotten coauthor credit
on these research projects, and I've
grown to really appreciate how research can impact things
and how art and science can come together to make a difference.
Rosie and I spoke at a public health conference
during COVID in San Antonio.
It was March of 2020, so it was early days of COVID,
but I never thought I would be speaking
to a bunch of future doctors and people
in that space about this work.
But I realize now that there are ripples that I can't predict.
One of the other ripples that I wasn't able to predict
has been the way the media attention has generated
a number of viral videos.
One of the things that was uploaded by Upworthy
has over 6.4 million views.
It's a short, two-and-a-half minute video.
That was noticed by the company Brut, which is based in France.
They published it in both English and French,
on Instagram and Facebook.
This particular one that is subtitled in French
had over 1.4 million views.
And then I was contacted by a Russian media company called
TOK, which publishes a lot of, I think, public interest,
feel good type stories.
I still don't know what any of these subtitles mean,
but they've also published their own edited version
of this story on Instagram, and it's also gone viral.
Our film, as Rebecca mentioned, was released.
It was premiered in Dallas.
We went through this film festival experience.
All of this was new for me as part
of my own creative process.
Even though I had a background in advertising,
and had made commercials and things like that before,
I'd never been part of editing a feature-length film,
and certainly didn't really know anything about the film
festival experience.
But, again, it was another chance for me
to meet people in different locations.
But I think my favorite kind of ripple
is doing what I'm doing now on Zoom,
but it is speaking to groups and getting
to let them hold a sign for the first time,
ask questions, talk about their own experiences,
and I've been blessed to get to speak to groups of students
of all ages, policemen, a Buddhist young adult
conference that happened to be held in Dallas, Texas, just
professional groups, just all sorts of groups,
and I try, if I can work it into my schedule,
I say yes to everybody.
Sometimes the ripples are small.
I was doing an artist talk at a big, fancy building in Downtown
Dallas, and this man showed up wearing a US Marine Corps
baseball cap.
He was not your typical art talk person.
And at the end of the talk, he started to ask a question,
and then just broke down in tears,
and we had a lot of trouble understanding him.
Later that night, he sent me this message on Facebook.
"I am the Vietnam Marine that spoke to you tonight
at your talk.
I'm not sure if I could be heard when I spoke.
Seeing your collage of signs was a startling experience for me.
I just stared at it and cried for 30 minutes.
It gave me a place to attach some of my angst,
and it helped me heal a little.
I find you to be personally just as moving.
Thank you, sir, for helping make the voices
in the wilderness a bit easier for the world to hear."
I've also learned that about 11% of the people on the street
are veterans.
The fastest-growing segment of homeless
on the streets in the United States
happens to be female veterans.
So I've unwittingly become a student of this cause,
and continue to learn a lot about that.
Some other ripples, this is an exhibit that was in Indiana,
and I was sent photos when classes were there,
looking at the exhibit.
My good friend Lisa, in the red sweatshirt here,
mentors a bunch of young women here in Dallas, Texas,
and every year, I speak to them, and, sometimes,
we'll watch the documentary.
But it's a small group, but very touching for me
to be able to see these young girls of very different
backgrounds connect to this.
One of the largest groups of students that I brought signs
for was this high school in South Texas,
and I think I had over 400 signs in my Prius at the time,
in the middle of a hot Texas summer.
One of the things that I've also come to realize
is the smell that is baked into a lot of these signs, which
has to do with human sweat, and cigarette smoke, and pizza
juice from a pizza box, that it fills my car,
and my car permanently has a certain smell to it,
because I am often carrying signs around.
But it's one of the reminders of the humanity
of the people behind the signs, and I'm grateful for it.
It reminds me of that.
Also, in the lower left-hand corner,
you can see the young blonde woman,
right above the L in the word "lay."
She was a junior in high school at the time.
Afterwards, she and I took a selfie together.
And two semesters ago, she was in my class at SMU,
and reminded me that she had been there and sent that selfie
to me, and just, again, another strange ripple that I really
appreciate.
I was mentioned in a tweet from a high school in the UK,
which was saying their students were studying issues associated
with homelessness, and they cited Henry Moore, Leonardo da
Vinci, and me as inspiration, which a lot of my art friends,
of course, gave me grief for.
But it was amazing, because I went to their website
and got to see some of their student projects
that were, in some cases, drawing
hands and feet of the unhoused, in some cases,
doing things with cardboard to make sculptures,
and I had no idea where this school was
or anything, and yet another reminder
that there's so many unintended ripples that I think
are important.
One of the things that I brought to the college where I teach
is we're about to do our third annual march across campus,
which usually is an event where we make blessing bags that we
give to people to put in their cars
to hand out on the streets.
We have a series of speakers, typically
some from local organizations that deal with the homeless,
and then we march silently in single file across campus,
just as an awareness raising event.
And this was from the first year that we did it.
And, you know, I teach at an incredibly lucrative--
most of our students are fairly privileged.
Not all of them, and, typically, I
have at least one speaker who is a student at SMU who
has experienced homelessness, and I've already
had a couple of students volunteer
to speak at this upcoming march, which is
going to be November the 20th.
And then, last year, we did this in COVID, which was,
of course, a bit of a challenge, but I'm
going to show you a short video that one of my other students
shot and edited of our second march.
[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]
And I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming march.
I think there are a lot of students
who weren't able to participate during COVID,
and we've already gotten interest from a lot
more student groups, sororities, the human rights organization,
and other organizations, like Mustang Heroes.
So I'm looking forward to having a lot more students join us
for this march, as well as people in the community.
This is an image that I'm sharing which,
another unexpected ripple for me was that a group in Boston,
or just outside of Boston, a high school theater group
was putting on a production of Rent,
and they asked if I would do an installation at a gallery that
was adjacent to the theater where
they were doing the production.
I said sure, and before it was over with,
the students had asked if they could use some of the signs
on the set.
And this is actually on the night of the production
that I got to attend, and you can
see that signs were used in the set
of their production of Rent.
I was really moved by their level of skill
and their singing ability, and they also
allowed me to go to one of their rehearsals,
and I'm going to show you a short clip that I shot
on my iPhone at the rehearsal, which, if you listen closely,
you can hear me sniffling toward the end of it,
because they moved me to tears.
[MUSIC - JONATHAN LARSON, "SEASONS OF LOVE"]
(SINGING) 525,600 minutes.
525,000 moments so deer.
525,600 minutes.
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,
in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In 525,600 minutes, how do you measure a year in the life?
How about love?
Measure in love.
It still gets to me a little bit.
One of the organizations that we've
partnered with before in Dallas is
Vogel Alcove, which specializes in helping single mothers,
for the most part, lots of homeless mothers and children,
and it's an amazing organization.
They provide schooling.
They've got daycare.
They hand out supplies of all sorts.
They do their own fundraisers, and have
brought in big-name musical performers
for their fundraisers.
But one of the things they do every year on January 1
is called "Day 1 Dallas," and they've
asked me to participate at the last few years.
And one of the things that I've developed
in this process has been, especially for smaller
children, or adults, is putting a bunch of art supplies
out and asking the children to answer the question,
"What is home?"
I've done this at several exhibits as well,
and I've collected thousands of answers to that question,
but it's also a chance to encourage
the kids to be creative, and, of course, what's better than art
by kids?
Usually, between 5,000 and 10,000 people
attend this big event, so there are all sorts of activities
for kids and families.
You may notice there is a Star Wars character holding
a sign of the Death Star, which I
guess is technically his home.
But there were a bunch of people in costumes
there to entertain the kids.
He wandered up, and it's honestly
the first and only time that will probably ever happen,
to ask if he could do one of these "What is home?"
things, and I have a short video clip of him actually
making his creation.
But workshops for kids, for me, is another way
of having some impact, and, also,
one of the many things on my to-do list
is to develop curricula to take this into a place
where teachers could teach these kinds of things
to bring this kind of awareness into the classroom.
I mentioned earlier the most recent big exhibit
that happened right before COVID was at the Anchorage Museum.
Literally, February was when the exhibit opened.
I was able to go and spend a week there and go
on opening night.
I also bought about six signs while I was in Alaska,
so you can imagine, there are people
on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska in February.
I was walking through snow and ice,
and I just couldn't fathom what it must be like for them.
I'm going to show you just a short clip to show you,
this was right before everything got shut down,
so there were people there, but this is about 500 signs, just
for reference.
[INDISTINCT BACKGROUND CHATTER]
That exhibit was also done in conjunction
with the man who wrote the book Evicted, which
was a bestseller a few years back,
and they've developed an exhibit related
to the data that's in that book about evictions,
which is really powerful.
I strongly recommend it.
And, again, to go from a larger thing to a smaller ripple,
I was contacted this past summer by a young woman who's
a junior in high school here in Dallas,
and she was looking through colleges,
came across this project when she was looking at SMU,
and asked if I would do a Zoom call with her,
asked if I would mentor her over the summer.
She came and helped pack boxes for an exhibit
that we did not too long ago, and then she
sent me this piece of art that she made,
which she said represented the impact the exhibit had on her,
that the signs changed from cardboard to bright colors
as she realized that there were unique stories
behind each one of the signs.
She is continuing to volunteer.
She's actually come to events on SMU's campus.
And, to me, just, again, excites me
when I see the enthusiasm, and passion, and leadership
that a lot of students demonstrate.
And to that end, I now am a Faculty-in-Residence here
at SMU, and I live one of the dorms, called
"Armstrong Commons."
We've done a number of events here at the dorm.
One of them was making blessing bags.
I think we've done this three or four times now.
But I'm always impressed by the students, their willingness
to be involved, to help promote the activities.
Many of them are also going to be helping us
with the march that's coming up.
And just this Saturday, to really bring
this to the present time, this past Saturday,
this is the first time I did an exhibit
in the hallway of this dorm, and I had a student volunteer
to help, and we put it up in about five hours
and put up a piece of blank cardboard
on the opposite wall with sharpies attached,
and I'm enjoying watching students answer
the question, "What is home?," and continuing
to add to that bit of data.
So, I promised that I was going to tell you
more about Eddie, the man who made this sign, "Something
to ponder.
What if God occasionally visits Earth
disguised as a homeless guy panhandling
to see how charitable we are?"
This is me asking Eddie about this sign when
I met him in 2014.
So tell me a little bit about what was behind your sign.
I had a more generic sign prior to that,
and I wanted to go in a different direction,
like, be a little innovative.
So, I mean, you know--
But how did you get the idea?
I mean, where did that come to you around--
I, actually-- It actually came to me, like, believe it or not,
out of anger initially, because someone
had said something derogatory towards me
when I had asked them for money, and I came up with it
in my head.
I didn't think of it--
I mean, I didn't say it to them, but I said,
like, you know, for all you know, I'm God.
Like, it's just, you know, checking to see, you know,
how charitable people are, and if that's the case,
you people are screwed, you know?
So I knew I liked Eddie right from the beginning.
He was clever.
He was intelligent.
You can see that he was a bit scuffed-up.
What I didn't know about Eddie at the time
was that he was a heroin addict, and that some
of those scabs on his face were literally
from overdosing and falling onto the concrete out
of the back seat of a car, and then being
revived by the police.
I think he said two or three times he
was revived after overdosing.
And two years later, I was talking about this project,
and you can see, this photo was posted on Facebook.
You can see that behind me is a big image of Eddie's sign.
He came across this and sent me a message out
of the blue two years later that said, hey, you know, I'm Eddie.
You probably don't remember me, but I'm
the guy who made this sign.
And I replied, of course, I remember you,
because you're in the documentary.
I see you all the time.
And that's when he told me about the fact
that he was an addict at that time,
that he was now sober for coming up on two years,
that he was employed, he was in much better physical condition,
had reconnected with his son and daughter,
and was a brand-new grandfather.
I told him that I was about to go back to Philadelphia.
I was doing an exhibit that was part of a big, huge group
show at the Democratic National Convention,
and I asked him if I could pick him up and take him to lunch.
This was the exhibit, which was a very small exhibit,
but it was a humongous show, with, I think,
about 100 artists total.
And you can see that Eddie's sign is on this exhibit.
I picked Eddie up.
He looked much better.
He had put on probably 30 pounds.
And he stood in front of this exhibit, and, of course,
it was the first time he'd seen that sign that he
made with his own hands two years prior,
and he started crying.
We spent, I think it was four hours.
We ate a burrito.
We talked.
I got to know him, really just loved his energy.
And since then, he has been willing to volunteer
to speak on panels any time I contact him for help.
He wants to help, because he's now sponsoring
lots of other addicts.
And here are just a few images of his first grandkid.
He now has two, but he's probably
one of the most doting grandfathers I've ever met.
I was doing an exhibit a few months
after that in Philadelphia, at UPenn,
based on that research project I mentioned a little while ago.
Dr. Frasso is the one in the gray hair next to me.
And we had all of her students, and Eddie joined us
on the panel to talk about what it's
like to be behind the sign.
We continued to do things together,
and a little while after that, I invited
Eddie to join me on stage at another TEDx Talk
about this project, which was titled "It's just us,"
and it was a chance for me to let Eddie talk
about life behind the sign.
As much as I talk about this project, it's difficult for me
to bring the kind of awareness that Eddie's able to bring.
We've continued to do things, and then,
not that long ago, again, this was right before COVID,
I was contacted to do another exhibit in Philadelphia
by this priest, Father Jim, who I am now really a big fan of.
He asked me to do this during Lent at his church
outside of Philadelphia.
It's actually in Flourtown.
And he is one of the churches that
has one of those homeless Jesus statues
right outside the front door.
So we did the exhibit.
At the end of the exhibit, I went back down there
to take all the signs down, pack them up, and ship them back.
This was a group of people who were there making
blessing bags that last day.
And Eddie, of course, joined us for the panel discussion again.
And at the very end of this, Father Jim
asked me to go outside, and he wanted
to tell me about these three acres
that they had on the other side of their graveyard.
It was a pretty big complex they had at this church,
and, apparently, they had been trying
to figure out what to do with these undeveloped acres.
And up until I was there, they were
planning to do a wedding venue.
But here's what he told me.
Because of the We Are All Homeless exhibit,
and everything that has happened since you've been with us,
we decided that we're going to turn our remaining three
acres into a transitional housing venue,
with individual homes, eight to 10 of them,
with a central community center, where people
can come after they leave a shelter,
and live there for two full years,
and gain all of the support services
necessary for them to be sustained in the future,
and we're really excited about it.
So, when he and I first started to connect,
I told him that I had grown up the son of a mom
who was a hardcore Catholic, and that she had passed away,
but that I thought, if, you know,
she was somewhere looking down on all of this,
she probably was smiling, thinking that I was talking
to a priest, because I hadn't been
a Catholic for many decades, and I think
that always bummed her out.
He told me about his connection to his mom,
that his mom was the reason he became a priest.
And so, after he told me about what
they were going to do with the property,
he then shared this with me.
--your thing, we decided that we're
going to name this transitional village that's
going to support people out of homelessness in honor
and memory of your mom.
And so your mom's name is going to bear on this village.
I was not expecting that.
It's going to be called "Dorothy's Village."
They're still in the planning phase.
COVID slowed things up a little bit.
But he's keeping me updated on the progress.
But I mentioned this was a deeply personal journey for me,
and from a selfish perspective, I
think this single thing had the biggest impact on me,
and I just didn't expect it.
I mentioned the question "What is home?,"
which I've now asked of lots of people
and gotten answers at lots of exhibits.
One of the final pieces of the documentary
shows a compilation of some of the answers
that we gathered as we were traveling across the country.
But I began to ask this question of almost everyone that I met,
so the last clip that I'm going to show you is this one.
It is a place, when I get done with work,
I have a place to go sit down, relax, have my own quiet time,
whatever, be able to fix my own food.
I can pay my own bills.
That's home to me.
Home is like if you wrapped yourself
in a nice, warm comforter when it's cold outside.
That's home.
--I feel safe, where I feel comfortable.
It could be anywhere.
It doesn't really matter.
And what does home mean to you?
Home means heaven.
Having a place over my head, a roof over my head.
A place where it's dry and warm.
So it's inside?
Whatever you make it.
The one word that I would use for home is probably "safety."
Home, for me, would be some place I could go to every day,
sleep, take a shower, and that I wouldn't
have to worry about finding a place to sleep every night.
Home is wherever I'm with the ones I love
and the ones who love me.
It really doesn't care, like, where it is.
It's safety, number one.
It's comfort, and it's kind of, like, what you know.
Wherever I lay down at night.
That would be home to me.
It doesn't have to be a physical place.
It can be the people you're with or the experience you're
having.
But describing it is pretty hard.
Home means security to me, because, well,
a large portion of the world, well, of the United States,
will never know what it's like to not
have a roof over your head.
You know, I think a lot of people take advantage of that.
To not know where you're going to lay down
is, like, the most frightening thing in the world.
What does home mean to you?
Sanctuary.
A place of bliss.
See, now, I haven't had a home since my wife died.
See, when me and her were together, she made it a home.
Love and family, that's what a home is to me.
Home, to me, was where my mom was there,
you know, eating dinner.
But as of right now, home is Clinton Bridge.
That's where I sleep, underneath Clinton Bridge.
To me, a home is I can put a key in a door,
open it, and go inside, and relax, take a shower, watch TV.
You sleep in a bed.
You know, that's home to me.
Home, to me, would be, one day, somewhere I can call my own.
That's what home really means to me.
Right now, home is wherever I can sleep.
Home, to me, is, like, pretty much
where my friends are at, where my family is at,
like, because we don't have a sense of home,
so home is our family.
Like, wherever we are together, when I lay my head next to him
at night, that's home to me.
Home, for me, is that feeling of--
I don't know how to say this in English,
but it's literally, like, feeling,
physically and spiritually.
It's feeling love, happiness, and calmness
all at the same time.
Like, they cannot leave without each other.
28 years ago, when I started buying signs,
I really did used to think it was us and them,
and, today, what I know is that it's just us.
Thank you for having me, and if anyone has questions,
I look forward to trying my best to answer them.
Thank you, Willie.
Thanks for sharing about your inspiring project.
28 years.
That, in and of itself, is pretty incredible.
Clearly, it seems like this has become your life's work, right?
At least part of it, for sure.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Not that it's the only thing you have going on,
but it's interesting to see you talk
about the intersections, and ripples, and all
these surprising things that have
come about from this project, and I
think that's really beautiful.
I wanted to ask you, to start off,
like, obviously, there have been so many
positive impacts, the ripples that you shared with us,
about this project.
But, or and, how do you care for yourself in this work,
because this is really heavy, like, heart and soul stuff,
so how do you how do you do that?
That is a good question, and I would say I haven't always
been great at managing that.
I noticed that Tim Chumley is on this call, the co-director
of the film, and, Tim, I welcome any comments,
if you want to add to something I'm saying.
I think that, like, for us, when we were traveling
across the country, I'm, of course, quite used
to buying signs on a regular basis,
but the other filmmakers were not,
and we would debrief every night and process our feelings
a little bit, let go of some of the things
we might be hanging on to.
As a long-term caretaker, I would also
say that this is a challenge for me to let
go of wanting to save everybody, and take care of everybody,
and that I have to keep remembering that I've
got this bigger purpose of spreading awareness,
and it's not easy.
Yeah, the nightly check-ins were pretty important,
because it was a very heavy--
certain days were heavier than others,
but many days we're incredibly emotionally draining
and taxing, and at the same time, it was very rewarding.
There were a few days that, as I recall,
were more challenging than others.
Talk about when you met Michael, Willie.
Yeah, so, I showed them a picture of Michael,
and he was the man with one leg, the Vietnam vet.
Literally, after that interview, which
was in a little random piece of grass in Omaha, Nebraska,
we went over to the parking of a Burger King,
and Tim and one of the other filmmakers
were interviewing me about interviewing Michael,
and I completely broke down, unexpectedly,
talking about him, and I think it may have been because he
was about my same age.
I'd also lost another personal friend recently
who was missing a leg.
I don't know what triggered me so much about him.
But as much as I do this, I still
have to remember that this takes a toll,
and I do tend to collect these stories and carry them around,
and it's tough to process that.
I'm going to field a question out of the chat from Kim
earlier on in the presentation.
They ask, "Is it common to find people
who are on the autism spectrum disorder who
begin self-medicating themselves for anxiety?
I have done some work with ASD addicts."
So, I'm not a mental health expert, obviously.
As I mentioned, I've heard figures from a third
to as high as 60% in some communities
of the people on the street have some form of mental illness.
I love this question, because it brings
to light this idea of addiction, drugs and alcohol,
and self-medication.
I think a lot of people who aren't
familiar with the situation people are in on the street
tend to immediately dismiss addicts as people that
don't deserve any help or care, and the truth
is that a lot of them don't have health care.
They have no way to get prescriptions.
They are medicating, and drugs and alcohol
are their best option.
And we all know that's not great.
Nobody wants that to be the case.
But thanks for that question, because, again, I
don't know specifically about the autism situation, but I do
know that there is a high percentage of people
that are on the street.
We have a question from Massimo.
"Can you expand on where the title came from,
We Are All Homeless?
How did you conceive of that?"
So, I was in a class in 2008, and I remember the class.
It was a class on, what's the word, art that disrupts.
The class was about--
I'm blanking on the word for the kind of movement.
But it was about coming up with art projects
to disrupt everybody's daily life.
And I was clearly in this throes of trying to figure out
doing something with homeless signs,
and it occurred to me in class that I'm just
going to call this project We Are All Homeless.
I don't know why necessarily.
I think my underlying idea was that we're all human beings.
We all need to ask for help.
We've all struggled.
We've all messed up in various ways.
And at that time, of course, it was a few years back,
and so I immediately went online to see
if the URL was available.
I bought it, and from that point forward,
I've called this We Are All Homeless.
A lot of times, when people ask me about that name,
I will ask them, what does it mean to them.
And so, Massimo, I don't know if you're willing to share,
but I'd be interested in hearing what that title said
to you when you first heard it.
So Massimo, on the chat, says, "I
thought you were giving them a voice
and they were saying that."
I think that's a great interpretation as well.
You know, not everybody, when I buy a sign,
do they want to know why I'm buying the sign,
but a fair number do, and so I tell them,
this is a long-term art project about raising awareness,
and I am blown away by how quickly they go,
hell yeah, somebody needs to tell our story,
and it's like they get it much quicker
than a lot of my friends do.
And I often hand out stickers that
say "We Are All Homeless," to them,
and they seem to get that title pretty quickly as well.
So for whatever that's worth.
Willie, I know you often say your initial
and sort of primary goal is to raise awareness
about the issue of unhoused and people
who experience homelessness.
What it's grown into is an empathy building exercise,
right?
And so, I mean, clearly, people are having that experience
as they see your signs, whether it personally affected them
or not.
So I think that's a really beautiful thing.
Professor Deanna Hernandez is asking,
"Why study empathy in students, and what have you
noticed about people and empathy through your work?"
Well, I could probably turn it over to Tim,
and he would have us in tears talking about a few
of his early experiences buying signs.
Tim's a long-time friend of mine,
and I just got to watch him dive deep into this
during this process, so I may turn it back over
to you in a second, Tim.
But I'd also like to share that, when I went to Philadelphia
and did this research project with the Jefferson students
for a week, so these are all grad students who are likely
going to be in the public health space or become doctors,
none of them had had, really, any significant encounters
with folks on the streets.
After a week of doing this, they were amazingly comfortable
talking to the folks they were interviewing, and some of them,
I think three in particular, said,
as a result of this week project,
they were changing the focus of their medical practice pursuit,
and two of them were going to go into the public health space,
directly working with the unhoused.
So my experience, and I also encounter this even
with students here at SMU, is that awareness
is what leads to the empathy shift
and to the compassion shift.
And I'm so used to it that I forget it,
but I am reminded often that there is just
a lot of power in the signs and the stories
that people project when they see the signs.
Tim, I know you've got probably things to add.
Any thoughts?
I think it's important, because there's
a financial aspect to the sign, I
think it's important to disassociate those two pieces,
because I think a lot of people may think,
well, it's incumbent upon me to give this person money
when I see them on the street, and one
of the things that I've learned through this
is that it's really not about that.
It's more about connection.
As Willie has said a number of times,
if you don't do anything other than acknowledge
that person, if you stop, and you say, hey, what's your name?
How are you doing?
My name is Tim.
That alone is an example, a demonstration of empathy
that, in my judgment, a lot of these people
are missing in their everyday lives,
because, as some of the signs have said,
a lot of these people feel completely invisible,
and to be acknowledged, and to be connected with,
just that alone can be very profound.
Many of us on this call are working in higher education.
We're working in California at community colleges.
And, of course, we see rising rates
of students who are impacted through the housing crisis,
and eviction, food insecurity, you know,
and a lack of basic needs.
And so, of course, these issues are often
compounded by the fact that they're
caring for their families, trying to find work, or have
multiple jobs, and they're trying to get an education,
and, you know, do better, right?
And so, for viewers who work in higher education, or who
just want to help and be a part of the change,
you know, you talk about the small things,
so are there small things that we
can do to be part of positive change around issues
of homelessness?
Well, I think what Tim said, you know, the beginning point
is to see the people on the streets, let them see us,
which, really, Signs of Humanity is really
about seeing the humanity in each other.
So I think that's an easy thing.
As someone who's an educator, or as just a human being,
I think another thing that can contribute
is to be a voice for those folks.
When I'm in a group of some of my wealthy white friends,
and somebody makes a comment about someone experiencing
homelessness, or them as a group,
and it's derogatory, when I can be a voice for them,
because they're not there to speak up for themselves
or their stories, that seems like a simple thing,
but I have witnessed the change it can make in my small groups.
And then I've seen some of my friends,
who I've been in groups with for years, take that on themselves
and come and tell me about times they've
called their friends out, or they've stopped their friends
from saying things, and not from a shaming place at all,
but simply to try to educate.
And I think awareness and compassion go together,
and that empathy goes up when people learn things.
And so it's so easy to be ignorant,
and to just keep on going about our lives without looking.
So, you know, also, I, as you were talking,
pulled up this message.
So, I posted about our march that's
coming up on November 20.
A student I've never met randomly
messages me through Instagram and says, "Hello.
I'm an SMU student who experienced homelessness.
I actually had an article about my story on the SMU Daily.
I wanted to know when the We Are All Homeless on-campus event
with speakers is.
If it's OK, I'd like to speak and share my story,
because I don't think many SMU students have experienced
homelessness, or really know what that means.
I'd like to provide some insight,
and maybe inspire more support."
So this came from, and it turns out,
it's a young Asian woman, who I have not met,
but I look forward to meeting, and she's
going to speak at our event on the 20th.
And, you know, I find that, I say this a lot,
but to stay open to where this project takes me,
I'm constantly getting to meet amazing people,
and realizing that the more we simply
make space for each other, it's profound at how
much impact that can have.
And as an educator, of course, I think
it's the greatest gig on the planet.
So, all of you, kudos to all of you
that are teaching in any form.
But bringing it into the classroom,
I bring my signs into the classroom
and make students pick a sign, and then
write two or three sentences about the person they
thought was holding that sign.
And, you know, again, a bunch of privileged students
shock me by their level of insight.
And so I think there's lots of ways to bring it
into the classroom too.
On that note of classrooms and students,
I think it's interesting that you began in advertising,
and then, later on, pursued an MFA.
Is there any, I don't know, advice that you could give
to students that might be pursuing art
as a first or even second career option?
Yes.
I think part of it is to, as I said earlier,
some version of trust your goofy ideas and your weird instincts
when they come up, because art often
comes from a place of discomfort,
and not averting our eyes, and being
willing to tell the uncomfortable truths.
I think that I certainly have paid attention to,
beginning with grad school, watching
how art in the country, that there is more and more art
that seems to be focused on marginalized groups,
and ways of bringing conversations to us in a way
that maybe they didn't happen earlier.
So I would tell students to, whatever
the thing is that you are passionate about,
dive in with both feet.
Go figure out how you can use art
as a tool to start those conversations
or to bring awareness.
You know, for me, the most powerful art
is something that moves me, some way, shape, or form,
and I've been shocked in museums, and galleries,
and on the street by stuff I didn't expect
to hit me the way it did.
And I think my students do this.
I mean, the reason I say this is the greatest gig on the planet
is every day in class my students are shocking me
by their creativity and by showing me
a new way of thinking about something.
So I think, to boil all that down, it's really,
I think, about encouragement, as much as anything else.
Keep those fires lit.
Thanks, Willie.
So I know we're getting near the end of our time.
I have 100 more questions, but I'll just ask one.
I know, before we went live, we talked a little bit
about a future ongoing project.
I don't know if you can share about that,
if there's, you know, anything you can share
about the future of this project or where you want to see it go.
Yes, I've alluded to my long to-do list,
which is sort of never-ending.
We do have a non-profit, and for us, funds that come to us
are used to raise awareness.
And I know Rebecca asked me earlier about a book, which
I've been working on a book for years, which
I feel like I finally have the shape of what this book is
going to be.
It's requiring me to write a lot more than I expected.
But I think that's going to be another way
to get this message out to a different and new audience.
We're also working on pitching this as a TV series
to follow up on the documentary.
We have ideas for other documentaries, one of which
is the story of Eddie Dunn, which, personally, I think
might be the most compelling documentary about homelessness
that I could imagine.
And besides that, I'm going to be doing an installation
in Boston next week.
I'm working with a group at USC, in LA,
about possibly bringing exhibits and/or a march to their campus.
I've got projects lined up throughout the spring of 2022,
research exhibits and speaking.
And, for me, it's always about, you
know, I wish we had enough money to hire an executive director
so I could really focus on the things I want to focus on,
because I do believe there are a lot of people that
want to support and help this project, and, for me,
it's just about having the human resources to get it all done.
But, yeah, lots of stuff in the works,
and, you know, I know Tim and I have
talked about a number of things as well.
We'll see where all of it goes.
But for now, as soon as I have openings in my calendar,
I try to fill them up with events like this or other ones.
I'm looking forward hopefully to one day getting
to do an exhibit at Wignall.
So fingers crossed.
Yes, us too, for sure.
Well, huge thanks to you, Willie.
We appreciate your generous spirit
and for sharing about your beautiful project.
A reminder to attendees, please fill out
the survey, and all of you please take good care,
and see you next time.
Thanks again, Willie.
Thank you.
Thank you all for being here.
Thanks, Tim, for joining.
Yes.
Thanks, Tim.
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