the street is our gallery

The project: The Art of Health, is an intersection of public art and public health conceived and curated by John Colavito – a student of the faculty of medicine at the NY University. The project was approved in the summer of 2016 and will last for another year around.

Street artist Biodpi has taken up on the project which aims to bring attention to people that need it. The artist explains in his own words more about this philanthropic project:

”The New York City Free Clinic takes care to provide primary care to people  in difficulty and that dont have insurance coverage or the money for the basic care (poor families and homeless).  Http://nycfreeclinic.med.nyu.edu Volunteers who work at the NYCfree clinic: students and lecturers from the faculty of medicine of NYUniversity.”

The project is financed by the “Rudin Fellowship Program”, a program that tries to encourage the use of the art in the field of medicine.
Https://med.nyu.edu/education/md-degree/current-md-students/master-scholars-program-humanistic-medicine/ethics-humanities-fellowship

General Info:
Number of homeless in New York: 62,692 of whom 15,802 are families.

homeless children 23.962

adults in households 23,715
adults 15.015 single
men single 11,080
single women 3,953

The artist’s attention has been focused on the material that distinguishes the homeless in the world, the “packaging cardboard”, used both as a roof that as an instrument to deliver requests for help.

The idea of “to handle with care” is at the basis of everything: through the use of the word fragile, which is equal in both ITA that in ENG, I wished to emphasize the concept of life being put at risk by the lack of care. The iconic reference to the Creation of Adam, frescoes by Michelangelo Buonarroti, is a second level of reading: the doctor is not God, but thanks to the care dignity can be restored.

Biodpi also explains: ”During the 5 days of work on the two walls, located in two different areas of Brooklyn, I met people who live there, was born with some children even a spontaneous, as fun, small laboratory of stencil, thanks to which it has been possible to create a human bond with these scugnizzi overseas that, smiling and vociando are courses at home to show the fantastic designs that had made with their own hands. I used a workshop and a study of Hairdresser for rifornirmi of water with which to dilute the paints and it seemed to me to enter directly into a scene of “Does the right thing” of Spike Lee, in which different cultures interact, cohabit mingling and create new worlds, Hispanics, afro-American, Asian and Europeans use different languages
and at the same time the same slang.”

Biodpi continued saying: ”It was really exciting to see the homeless , when the drawing was almost finished and then the message was clear, they thanked me and ask for information on timetables and the address of the clinic.
I have always thought that art in general could help the human race and which has been one of the flywheels of our intellectual development, helping the homo sapiens in creating different visions of the world and of its content, but see that my design can be of help to someone was for me a moment of “sad joy”.

”Another phase of the project was to give the stencil to the homeless, John told me: “with these colorful cartons we are giving them a voice slightly stronger to feel we are making more visible the “invisible”, clearly it was a small drop that we hope we can turn into a small tide in the coming months.”

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