WE ARE ALL HOMELESS
March 9 - April 27
Saint Miriam Parish and Friary
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 will, 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 27th, we 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 steely 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.
