Alex Strada '16 Makes a 'Public Address' at the Storefront for Art and Architecture
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 by Alex Strada '16—the inaugural Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs—is a citywide public artwork created with the Storefront for Art and Architecture that centers the lived experience of those most impacted by housing insecurity.
"The idea behind the residency is that artists are given full access to an agency," Strada explained in a conversation with Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer and journalist Jennifer Egan and Will Watts, Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy at Coalition for the Homeless. "You get a city ID card, email address, a cubicle, and the rest is really up to you."
While Strada had taught art in shelters for many years, she never had the kind of access that the residency provided, so she decided to spend the first year of the residency "just listening to people and visiting as many shelters as [she] could." This period of engagement resulted in three years of collaborative log-writing workshops hosted by Strada across the city.
Logbooks are shelters' official record-keeping devices, where staff write down important information each shift. As an artist, Strada was fascinated by the objects, and began inviting guests—people experiencing homelessness—to write down what they thought was important. "I wanted to come up with a structure where people experiencing homelessness—who are often spoken about or for, and not necessarily given a platform to be listened to—where there could be a project that challenged that," she said.
Strada used her newfound connections to collaborate with another city department—the Department of Transportation—to print entries from these alternative logbooks on official aluminum street signs throughout the city. 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. Find the various iterating installations across city parks and streets using the Storefront's handy map.
In Public Address, Strada reenvisions infrastructure as a site of public discourse. While affirming access to temporary shelter as a basic right, her installation embeds testimony in the visual systems of city signage to establish a dialogue with New York City that addresses the deeper crises of affordability, displacement, and care.
A New York-based artist and educator, Strada's 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, and is an alum of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, BOMB, New York Times, Hyperallergic, and on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show. Strada is the Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow and faculty at the Pratt Institute.
Public Address is on view to the public October 18, 2025–October 18, 2027.