Urban Art

“The Voice of the Homeless”: a public art project designed by BJ Krivanek. Consisting of two parts--”Orientation Rotunda,” right, and the “Electronic Statement”--the piece was created for the new Union Rescue Mission in Downtown. After interviewing residents of the mission, Krivanek applied their words about being homeless (in English and Spanish) to the rotunda--nouns in the top tier, adjectives in the middle, verbs at the bottom, with negative and positive attributes placed at 180 degrees from one another. “If you stand in the middle,”Krivanek says, “you can create a sentence--lots of different sentences.” Soon, residents will be able to create statements of their own through a computer that’s connected to an electronic message board, located 18 feet above San Julian Street on the mission’s west wall. This will give the homeless the opportunity to exercise their “public voice,” Krivanek says. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Krivanek recently moved to Chicago, where he is an associate professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.