This is My Home invites five selected artists to share their personal histories, experiences, and hopes for the future in their own site-specific installations. Each immersive "home" explores an issue critical to liberty today -- history and memory, technology, immigration, homelessness -- through personal reflections on the powerful forces that connect us all: cultural identity; trauma and loss; ingenuity and innovation; resistance and resilience. Individually and in dialogue with one another, each artist's home creates a space of understanding and empathy, two practices vital to the growth and preservation of liberty. This is My Home invites us to see beyond our own lived experiences and recognize our shared humanity.
Sean Lugo is a self-taught artist whose work makes direct reference to moments in time with friends, family, and acquaintances. While his models’ faces are hidden behind animal masks, human details make the images approachable and relatable to others. In Things Fall Apart, Lugo shares his own experience with homelessness, creating a space for reflection on whether being guaranteed a place to live is a luxury or a right. Follow him on Instagram @sean9lugo.
Zsudayka Nzinga is a mixed-media artist and designer who describes her studio practice as a form of cultural anthropology that aims to capture and archive the history and culture of Black Americans. In Afro Bohemian, visitors encounter both Africa and America in a tribute to what Nzinga calls “the living room we were never allowed to enter, a staple of a Black home and celebration of the respect and reverence of our elders.” Follow her on Instagram @zsudayka.
Ellen Hanauer is a sculptor and installation artist who has spent much of her career depicting the emotive states of the world through visual storytelling. She uses mixed media to share her personal history through object-based narratives. The House the Children Built pays homage to the children, past and present, who left their families and loved ones for a new life in America. Follow her on Instagram @ellenhanauer_.
Hagudeza Rullán-Fantauzzi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines their contemporary ballet and choreographic training with film, projection, and installation-based art. Their work is informed by their journey to tell stories and spark conversations that are often left unspoken. Después de las Cenizas (After the Ashes) uses light projections, 2-D, and 3-D forms to create a home of memory and resilience in the face of adversity and loss. Follow them on Instagram @hagudeza.
As an artist, Ana Mosquera explores the interface of digital and physical interaction, drawing inspiration from architecture, urbanism, cyberspace memories, and language. Evan Kassof is an opera maker, composer, and conductor. Trained as a physicist, his compositions use science and math as source material. Deadflipping explores the possibility of new, technologically driven social contracts that re-imagine what home can mean. Visitors contribute to an immersive soundscape and acquire a uniquely mined crypto token, transforming the fleeting experience of sight and sound into a bit of permanence. Follow them on Instagram @anacaribu and @evankassof.
Founded in 1991 by Connie Mercer, HomeFront provides homeless families with the resources they need to become independent. Created by HomeFront’s clients and artists in their ArtSpace Program, Through the Storm: Finding Home is an immersive experience that invites visitors to imagine the journey from homelessness to finding housing. Follow them on Instagram @ArtSpaceHomeFront.
Through the Storm: Finding Home is sponsored by NJM Insurance.
Homes are fabricated by Tiny WPA.
Tiny WPA places youth and adults at the forefront of stimulating community engagement and civic innovation by empowering them to design and build improvements to the public spaces, schools, and micro-infrastructure in their neighborhoods.
As an artist, 