Homeless Artists Respond to Stereotypes

<i>I See a Brighter Day</i>
<i>How You See Me</i>
<i>Pulling My Way Out!!!!</i>

Ruthann Traylor learned of research on stereotypes by Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, years ago when they were neighbors. (Cuddy was then studying for her doctorate at Princeton.) “I read the section on how the poor and homeless were perceived to 12 poor and homeless women at the shelter,”  says Traylor, who is now the director of ArtSpace, a homeless shelter in West Trenton, New Jersey, run by HomeFront, a nonprofit social service agency. “We spent a year and a half responding to this perception by collecting poems and art work by the people I work with.” In April 2010, an exhibition of this work opened at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs, with a panel discussion two weeks afterward featuring Cuddy and fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick; 200 attended, and the exhibition ran into August.

In the gallery here, see some examples of paintings by these homeless artists, made in response to the research that showed the homeless were generally perceived as both cold and incompetent.

Click here for the November-December 2010 issue table of contents

You might also like

Rendering Dreams in Art

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum

A New Voice

Ann Kim Ha’s poignant children’s books

Basking in the Beaux-Arts

Park offers art, nature, and history in New Hampshire

Most popular

Rebecca Henderson: Does Capitalism Need to be Reimagined?

How to reform capitalism to confront climate change and extreme inequality, with economist and McArthur University Professor Rebecca Henderson

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Explore More From Current Issue

Publications by Harvard Authors Spring 2025: New Releases

Operatic counterculture, a Passover graphic novel, James Joyce’s biographer, and more

Children's Books from Ann Kim Ha

Ann Kim Ha’s poignant children’s books

Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams at the Peabody Essex Museum

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum