Public Address: A Reading

This event is offsite at Columbus Park (across from Brooklyn Borough Hall and near 2/3/4/5 Borough Hall Subway) on Johnson Street 

Join artist Alex Strada, Public Artist in Residence with the New York City Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs, as she brings her long-term project with Storefront for Art and Architecture to Brooklyn’s Columbus Park. She is joined by a cohort of advocates, artists, and writers who invite you to experience Public Address, a citywide public art exhibition centering the voices of people experiencing homelessness and frontline shelter staff. 

The artworks in Public Address—handwritten and drawn accounts printed as aluminum city street signs—were created by people living and working within New York City's shelter system through log writing workshops. Written to be encountered and responded to, these anonymous entries are addressed to the NYC public, inviting reflection and collective attention. The project reconfigures an internal system of record-keeping into a public-facing form, redirecting the authority of municipal signage toward public testimony and listening.

In this intimate encounter with a multi-year, participatory art project, leading voices on issues of housing and homelessness, migration, the arts and civic life will read and respond to the log entries on view.  Guest readers are scholar Alexandra Délano Alonso, architect Nandini Bagchee, Arash Diba of VOCAL-NY, artist Pablo Helguera, author Suketu Mehta, Eva Raison, Director of Brooklyn Public Library's Outreach Services. community organizer and educator Rob Robinson, organizer Maria Ponce Sevilla, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), and author Samuel Stein. The readings will be accompanied by an artist-led walkthrough of the installation and its movement across the city.

About Participants

Alexandra Délano Alonso teaches Politics and Global Studies at The New School. Her scholarship examines state–diaspora relations, transnational citizenship, political memory, sanctuary and mutual aid. Her recent projects focus on public mourning in border contexts and memory activism surrounding enforced disappearances in Mexico, exploring grief as a site of political struggle. She writes across genres, engaging displacement, loss, and resistance at the crossings of languages and territories. Her books include Mexico and its Diaspora in the United States (Cambridge University Press), From Here and There: Diasporas, Integration and Social Rights beyond Borders (Oxford University Press), Brotes [Fragments] (2021), Las luchas por la memoria contra las violencias en México (co-editor, El Colegio de México, 2023), New Narratives on the Peopling of America (co-editor, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), and se acerca, se aleja (Elefanta, 2024). Across these works, she bridges migration studies, lived experience, poetry, and alternative political imaginaries.

Nandini Bagchee is the principal of Bagchee Architects and an associate professor at the City College of New York (CUNY). She has a wide range of experience in research-based design work that centers on cultural spaces that sustain community. Her design work has been published and exhibited widely in New York and beyond.

Bagchee is also a writer and the author of a book on the history and impact of activist-run spaces in New York City entitled, Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side (Fordham University Press, 2018). She is frequently invited to discuss her work at universities and other public forums locally and globally. She is the recipient of grants from the New York State Council of the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Graham Foundation. Nandini Bagchee holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Cooper Union and a Master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is licensed to practice architecture in the state of New York.

Arash Diba, LMSW (they/them), Managing Director of Harm Reduction Services, oversees all direct services at VOCAL-NY, (Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY),  a statewide grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness in order to create healthy and just communities.Their work includes program design and implementation, budget oversight, and strategic growth. They have over a decade of experience in social service provision through a harm reduction lens, and are active in mutual aid and community organizing work. Before that they were a public elementary school teacher and sexual assault hotline responder. Arash holds a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and an MSW with distinction from the Silberman School of Social Work, where they concentrated in Organizational Management & Leadership and later returned as an adjunct professor to teach economics for social workers. Arash was a 2020 NSWM Policy Fellow, completing research on how optimizing documentation requirements and electronic health records platform design could improve service efficacy in a hospitalization prevention program. Arash lives in Brooklyn by way of Washington DC and Tehran, Iran.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston;  RCA London; 8th Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; MoMA P.S.1, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center, among many others.

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘All Things Considered.’

Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written original screenplays for films, including ‘New York, I Love You.’ Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Eva Raison is Senior Director of Outreach Services at Brooklyn Public Library, where she leads the libraries work with immigrant communities, older adults, people impacted by incarceration, community health and social work.  Her team's most recent projects include the health outreach during COVID-19, coordinating the library's response to the increase of migrants in NYC, and growing the library's social work and navigation programs.  Eva's experience leading community-based services, language access and outreach spans 20+ years in NY and Chicago.  In 2018, Raison received the Library Journal Movers and Shakers award for her work developing immigration legal services and citizenship to Brooklyn Public Library.  She holds an MA in Migration studies form the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Rob Robinson is a formerly homeless community organizer and activist based in New York City. His work focuses on changing people’s fundamental relationship to land and housing. He works with social movements around the world including the Movement of People Affected by Dams in Brazil (MAB), the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (MST), Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa (the Shackdwellers movement) and the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages in Spain (the PAH). Rob is the USA-Canada Coordinator of International Alliance of Inhabitants, an alliance of 12,000 members worldwide which supports a Zero Evictions Platform. As a longtime member of the US Human Rights Network, his work is framed in international human rights law. In the US he works with communities on several social issues including, poverty and debt, police violence against the poor, gentrification and access to broadband. He is a regular guest lecturer at the City University of New York Graduate Center and has lectured at several US law school human rights institutes, including University of Miami, Northeastern University Massachusetts, University of California at Berkeley and Harvard. Rob is currently an adjunct professor of Urbanism in the Design and Urban Ecology program at Parsons New School University

Maria Ponce Sevilla is a nonprofit leader, advocate, and cultural practitioner with over a decade of experience working with undocumented immigrant communities in New York City and deported and returning youth in Mexico. Most recently, she served as Director of Development at Mixteca Organization Inc., where she advanced programs and resources for immigrant communities. Born in Puebla, Mexico, Maria grew up undocumented in New York City and returned to Mexico in 2006, an experience that shaped her lifelong commitment to advocacy. She went on to co-found Los Otros Dreamers Collective, supporting formerly incarcerated, deported, and returning youth as they navigated life back in Mexico. In 2012, she joined Dream in Mexico, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to higher education for deported and returning youth. Her story and advocacy work are featured in Los Otros Dreamers: The Book (2014). More recently, Maria has expanded her work into the arts, co-curating Te Amo Porque S.O.S Pueblo at the BronxArtSpace and facilitating a poetry workshop for immigrant women in collaboration with a fellow poet, creating space for storytelling, healing, and creative expression.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) and comes to DORIS with nearly twenty-years of experience as a librarian and archivist. Most recently, she served as Dean of Barnard College Library where she oversaw the Barnard Library and the Barnard Archives & Special Collections. Prior to Barnard, she served as Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement at NYU Division of Libraries, and as Head of Reference at the CUNY Graduate Center. For eight years, Shawn taught graduate library students at the Pratt School of Information, assigning reference letters from patrons who are incarcerated in collaboration with the New York Public Library’s Jail and Prison Services. Her work in archives stems from serving as a public speaker on archives, as a volunteer co-coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and as Archives Coordinator for Storycorps, among others. She sits on the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), and has co-steered national conversations on critical librarianship, critical race theory in libraries, GenAI, and the roles of libraries and community-based narratives.

A Brooklyn native, Smith-Cruz co-founded the nonprofit Sister Outsider at age 17, supporting young women in East Flatbush and Brownsville through paid living wages to provide peer-education with a harm-reduction framework. Her Garifuna and Jamaican immigrant family history has centered her work philosophy on information access and transparency as necessary for equitable civic participation. Her NYC upbringing led her to be a community writer and culture producer, including serving as a collective member of the WOW Cafe Theater and as volunteer coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives—two volunteer-run NYC collectives with over fifty-year histories and intergenerational values. 

 

Samuel Stein is a policy analyst who writes about the politics of housing and urban planning in New York City. He is the author of the books Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (2019) and A Right to Housing? (forthcoming, 2026).