Searching for Home is an art project – a series of 5” X 3” rectangles folded into loooong accordion books, filled with drawings and musings about what home means to homeless, housing-insecure, asylum-seeking, AND very securely housed artists and poets, i.e., all regular people.  I now have 30 full booklets, each with approximately 25 pages.

Evolution of the project:
Inspired by Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” artworks, I accordion pleated long rectangles of paper, myriad continuous squares. And inspired by the contemporary issue of lack-of-housing in NYC, I asked tens of NYC street or shelter dwellers to each draw or write something on a rectangle concerning their plight. Then, Church of the Holy Apostles, one of the large food pantries from which I  solicited many of my booklets’ contributions, asked me to bring more empty accordion booklets to be filled by their new population; asylum seekers. And I added some contributions by people who are fortunate enough to have homes.  Puffin Foundation and In Our Backyard funding enabled me to pay $1/page to the contributors.

The goal is to exhibit these booklets to all classes of New Yorkers, hoping they then see the un-housed as thinking, artistic people affected by their tough situations. 

Photos below: covers, Frontispiece, and some sample pages