Description
“CALIFORNIA: The Homeless State” (acrylic paint, oil/wax crayon, and pencil on heavy watercolor paper) recasts the mythic promise of the “Golden State” through the visible crisis of homelessness. Beneath California’s prosperity, iconic landscapes, and vast economy lies a housing emergency shaped by unaffordable rents, lost or reduced income, eviction, illness, family rupture, incarceration, and other intersecting pressures. Drawing on the language of the vintage postcard, the work contrasts an idealized image of abundance with the precarity experienced by more than 161,000 unhoused Californians, asking viewers to see homelessness not as an individual failure but as a systemic consequence of economic inequality and the lack of accessible housing.
