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How We Find Our Silenced Voices and Learn to Sing

Arts and Culture
This child who had been silenced went on to become a world-famous poet who won three Grammys and spoke six languages. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. She had an abounding love for everyone. She was asked by the United Nations to write a poem for the world.

Feeling Broken and Blue: The Life and Art of Paul Nicoloff

Arts and Culture
Blue was a gaunt, emaciated, crazed-looking, street person dressed in torn rags. Blue’s sense of humor was the tiny life-raft that he clung to all his life, amidst the raging seas of his stormy soul. Perhaps that’s why his sense of humor was so brilliantly honed: He needed it so badly. This article first appeared in the October 1999 issue of Street Spirit.

Beautifully Composed Art with a Social Conscience

Arts and Culture
Christine Hanlon’s beautifully composed images of outcast souls struggling to survive in barren urban landscapes seem to be ripped from today’s news stories about increasing poverty in America. Yet, her deeply felt paintings also are timeless in their portrayal of classic themes explored by great painters through the ages.

Haunting Art Portrays the Human Face of the Poor

Arts and Culture
Jonathan Burstein’s reveals the humanity of the homeless people, panhandlers, and down-and-out workers who appear in his paintings like saints walking among us unseen. His art is most beautiful and shot through with transcendence at those moments when it portrays people seemingly crushed to the earth by poverty and hopelessness.

Berkeley Artists on the Fringe

Arts and Culture
Artistic creativity arises from those trampled down by mainstream society. Artist Moby Theobald said, “There’s sort of a history of the starving artist. When a person is poor, they turn away from the outside world, or they feel turned away by the outside world; and so it maybe sparks their creativity.”