Artists+and+Poverty

Artists themselves are often imagined to live with groups of (perhaps happily) impoverished fellow artists in crappy apartments, eating a lot of macaroni and cheese, wearing sweaters to keep the heating bill low, working with messy materials on the floor into the early hours of the night. The "starving artist" image. I've met and worked with a number of these types over the summers, and it is indeed true that often art doesn't pay and some young artists live this way (though of course others have large expensive studios at their homes and sell out at gallery shows). What is more interesting though, to me at least, is the artist's depiction of the homeless or impoverished over time. As I looked through a number of paintings, I found that the mood has shifted over time. Images of homeless people in the past (some works I saw were from the 1960's through 80's) had a more whimsical casual feeling, homelessness was romanticized. They play to ideas of the jolly vagabond with a knapsack on a stick or the grungy hitchhiking teenager with ripped jeans and a backpack, people who we can imagine have chosen to be homeless. A lifestyle that may be difficult because of extreme poverty, but nonetheless is mostly about the pleasure of traveling, of being free to roam. More recent artwork more often showcases the hardships of poverty, sometimes serving as a political statement or a protest against oppressive systems. This art is meant to call attention to injustice and make the viewers //feel something//, be it anger or sympathy or awakening.

I intend to update this at some point and ideally include some images.