An old church façade. A pink sunset over the Hawthorne Bridge. A warm plate of breakfast. A tired face emerging from a sleeping bag cocoon.
These photographs, mounted in rows on long white boards, narrate their photographers’ daily lives on the street. Five men, the students in Sharon Agnor’s art class at the Julia West House day shelter, have been working on the photo essays since last winter.
“The whole idea is to show what life is like on the street for low-income people,” says Agnor, a metal sculptor. “Invisible people, ones who are marginalized.”
Since she began holding the weekly class for Julia West’s homeless and low-income patrons two and a half years ago, Agnor estimates that she has seen about 20 students come and go. Most of her students now have been with her for several years.
“There are a lot of people who come (to Julia West) that draw,” Agnor says. “We’re creative beings — we almost can’t help but express it in some way.”
The only difference for people experiencing homelessness, she believes, is that they may not have the means or the medium to express themselves. So Agnor, who has her own local studio, donates the time and materials necessary to give a few that outlet.
“There are times — I’m sure all of us have experienced this – were we’ve just had a really bad week,” says C.J. White, a soft-spoken, bespectacled Julia West client who has been in Agnor’s class almost since the beginning. “And this is one of the little things that made us forget about it, even if it was just for a couple hours.”
Agnor “really knows how to get us excited,” White adds. “She’s contagious.”
For the photography project, Agnor armed her disciples with 24-exposure disposable plastic cameras. They snapped shots of their sleeping setups, their hangout spots, their meals, their friends and their favorite Portland vistas.
A gallery show at Warner Pacific College next fall will give the class their first chance to display their work to the public. The photo essays will hang between their other projects, which they can try to sell if they choose.
The students are no strangers to art shows: Agnor occasionally arranges field trips to museums and galleries to further their artistic education. White says he’s deeply moved by the Impressionists; Larry May, the newest student, prefers modern art.
Agnor speaks as reverently of her pupils as they do of her. “They’re so open to ideas, and they’re talented,” she says. “My world is bigger because of them — absolutely bigger. I’m exposed to things that I would never be exposed to... it really blesses me.”
With Agnor’s guidance, the students have tiled a mosaic bench for the Julia West courtyard, bent wire into three-dimensional self portraits, pasted mixed media collages around painted cardboard masks, and glazed and fired raku pottery, which goes into the kiln drably colored and emerges with astonishing luster.
“Every time we do something like that, we have to talk about the analogy of it, too,” Agnor says. “Whenever material is subjected to extreme heat, it stresses and changes. It comes out something totally different — just like life. What (people on the street) live with is constant stress.”
Darren Alexander, who has been homeless on and off for fifteen years, says that making art is soothing. Like most of his classmates, Alexander is too modest to call himself an artist, but he’s happy to explain his work. In his collage, two African tribesmen stand behind a presidential podium under a speech bubble proclaiming, “Don’t pigeonhole me.”
“Part of it is a statement,” says Alexander, who carefully selects the few words he speaks. “Don’t assume that because you see one thing, that you know me.”
Alexander traces his creative streak back to childhood — he’s always written stories and drawn “doodles” — but Agnor’s class seems to have fueled his artistic ambition. He says he hopes to take filmmaking classes and work in movies or television.
“I have this idea,” he offers, “about a megachurch pastor who also happens to be a crime boss. Kind of like The Sopranos meets 7th Heaven.”
On their last visit to the Portland Art Museum, the class talked about abstract art. Later, they painted their own abstracts in acrylic. Rick Miles’s canvas is a storm of finger-painted colors, dark with bright sparks. His inspiration, he recalls, was good old-fashioned artistic conflict.
“I started to do my own stuff,” says Miles, a stubbly man in a trucker’s cap who likes to scavenge for art supplies in construction site dumpsters. “And then Larry said, ‘No, you’re not doing it that way. You’re going to have to do it the way the whole art class is doing it’... So I had a lot of anger in that picture.”
But stylistic squabbles don’t last long, and the classmates are tight-knit. “There’s a really cool synergy that happens when they’re all together,” Agnor says. “Our friendships that we’ve formed are probably the biggest deal.”
As they try to settle on their photos’ final arrangements, the men are also plotting a multimedia installation for their exhibition’s centerpiece. They plan to stuff a sleeping bag so it looks occupied, give it a video screen for a head and roll tape of interviews they’ll conduct with people from Julia West.
“They’re so excited to be able to do something and have somebody see it and say, ‘Wow, that’s great,’” Agnor says. “How often do they get to hear that from anybody for anything?”
Of course, there is vulnerability in documenting your life for the public, says Alexander, whose photos show him waking up at his campsite, eating a meal, and writing in his journal. “You want to show your best side,” he says, but “it’s going to be a show of warts and all.”
All the same, his classmate May hopes visitors will walk away from the gallery with a broader understanding of life outside.
“I think if people see the artwork, they’ll understand that there are a lot of people out there on the street that are artistic, but just don’t... have the ability to do it,” May says. “There’s more out there for the homeless than just sleeping around and (collecting) cans.”
