Artist Alex Strada’s citywide public artwork, Public Address, will culminate in an installation for Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the Queens Museum in partnership with Storefront for Art and Architecture. The project debuted in Manhattan in 2025 and will have traveled to Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Staten Island before its final presentation in Queens.

Conceived through Strada’s tenure and ongoing role as the inaugural Public Artist in Residence with the New York City Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs, Public Address centers the lived experience of those most impacted by housing insecurity. The project establishes a dialogue with the city, affirming access to temporary shelter as a basic right while also exposing the limits of such provision in addressing deeper crises of affordability, displacement, and care.

Public Address builds on three years of collaborative log-writing workshops hosted by Strada in shelters across the city. In this exhibition, handwritten reflections by shelter residents and frontline staff are translated onto upcycled aluminum street signs fabricated by the Department of Transportation’s Sign Shop. Transforming the bureaucratic tool of the logbook and the language of city infrastructure into public art, these signs invite public dialogues about housing insecurity, migration, caregiving, and resistance. Over 400 participants have contributed so far, with new entries continually integrated as the project expands.

By embedding testimony within the visual and spatial codes of the city, the project amplifies voices too often excluded from public discourse while foregrounding ways in which civic infrastructures can be reimagined as platforms for listening. Most importantly, the project’s public presence offers unhoused people and staff an unprecedented space for their voices to be centered and heard.

Alex Strada (b. New York, NY, 1988) is an artist and educator based in New York City. Through a research-based approach grounded in transdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement, her projects reimagine systems of power and create platforms for collectivity, civic agency, and political transformation. Strada holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She is a Fine Arts faculty at the Pratt Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include the Queens Museum, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA; Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, CT; Times Square Arts, NY; and Project Row Houses, TX. Strada has received grants from the Graham Foundation, Artadia, NYFA, NYSCA, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, BOMB, New York Times, Hyperallergic, and on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show.

The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) is dedicated to supporting and strengthening New York City’s vibrant cultural life. DCLA promotes and advocates for quality arts programming and articulates the cultural community’s contribution to the city’s vitality. The Department represents and serves nonprofit cultural organizations involved in the visual, literary, and performing arts; public-oriented science and humanities institutions; and creative artists at all skill levels who live and work within the five boroughs. DCLA also provides donated materials for arts programs and commissions permanent works of public art at city-funded construction projects. For more information, visit nyc.gov/culture.

Storefront for Art and Architecture amplifies the understanding of the built environment through artistic practice. Founded in 1982 by artists and architects in downtown New York, Storefront has chronicled the city’s changing urban landscape and remains committed to producing and presenting work about diverse notions of place and public life. Learn more at storefront.nyc.