homeless in the land of plenty

Her next series in clay and mixed media was on homelessness. We usually ignore homeless people; we pass them by as if they were invisible. They represent the failures of our society and we don’t want to deal with them. Using clay and wood in narrative sculptural environments, Grabel captures the desolation and humanity of the homeless, living on the edge of society, surviving as best they can on the streets.

In this work, Grabel reflects on the urban environment: a place where on one block you’ll see boarded up buildings and the next, stretch limos. Commuting to Manhattan to her day job as a computer programmer and systems analyst in the early 1980’s she saw, daily, a homeless man in tattered dirty clothes huddled against a building next to an elegant store window.