Public Address by Alex Strada — 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. 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. 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.

First debuting in Manhattan in October 2025, the main installation has travelled to Brooklyn and the Bronx, iterating across city streets and parks through 2027. The project will continue to Staten Island before making its final stop at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in partnership with the Queens Museum.

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.