Support We Are All Homeless

Saint Miriam will be the next home for the WE ARE ALL HOMELESS project. The exhibit will feature a cross-section of the works from Willie Baronet on two levels of the parish. We will also tie into this exhibit our Lenten experience for 2019. We will sink more deeply into how we live a life of service and care for the marginalized and the lost and the lonely. We will try to deepen our own willingness, too, as we seek the homeless, the food insecure, and the forgotten. From the opening of the exhibit on March 9th to its closing celebration on April 27thwe will become homeless.

Thank you supporting this Art Installation and project!

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Saint Miriam will be the next home for the WE ARE ALL HOMELESS project. The exhibit will feature a cross-section of the works from Willie Baronet on two levels of the parish. We will also tie into this exhibit our Lenten experience for 2019. We will sink more deeply into how we live a life of service and care for the marginalized and the lost and the lonely. We will try to deepen our own willingness, too, as we seek the homeless, the food insecure, and the forgotten. From the opening of the exhibit on March 9th to its closing celebration on April 27thwe will become homeless.

The WE ARE ALL HOMELESS project began in 1993 due to the awkwardness its founder, Artist and professor, Willie Baronet, felt when he pulled up to an intersection and encountered a person holding a sign, asking for help. Willie has since purchased more than 1,300 homeless signs over the past 24 years, and he uses this collection to create installations to raise awareness about homelessness. Like many of us, he wrestled with whether or not he was doing good by giving them money or to simply ignore them or avoid their steel gaze. Mostly he admitted the internal struggle with his moral obligation, and how his own choices contributed in conscious or unconscious ways to poverty. Willie struggled with the unfairness of the lives people are born into, the physical, mental and psychological handicaps. In his struggle, he avoided eye contact with those on the street, unwilling to really see them, and in doing so – like most of us – avoided seeing parts of himself. That changed once he began asking these people if they would sell their signs! Willie’s relationship to the homeless has been powerfully and permanently altered and now, so has the world.

There have been over 30 art installations of WE ARE ALL HOMELESS since 2009 in the US and UK, including exhibits at NYU, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge. In 2016 we were honored to exhibit in Philadelphia and Cleveland during both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention. In Philly we were part of Truth to Power, a group show sponsored by Rock the Vote, which included artists Banksy, Ron English, and Shepard Fairey. The installations provide an experience for people to explore the humanity of the signs, and questions regarding the nature of home, compassion and what it means to truly see each other.

We will close our exhibit in late April after Easter comes again. We will use this time to screen SIGNS OF HUMANITY, a documentary film where Willie and three filmmakers drove across the country, interviewing more than 100 people on the streets and purchasing over 280 signs that explores inter-related themes of home, homelessness, compassion, and humanity as well as engage ourselves and the community through a Q&A session that will feature Willie, a former homeless man and now advocate, Eddie Dunn, (someone Willie actually purchased a sign from), Tom Costello, founder of the Joy of Sox, and Dr. Rosie Frasso who did the research project at Jefferson University. This will be a spectacular day!

Thank you supporting this Art Installation and project!