“Tax Refund Posters”, 2015
My artist volunteers and I hung 100 or so beautiful 18” X 24” posters all over the city. These directed the poorest of the poor to participating soup kitchens to apply for a tax credit due them by dint of their living in NYC all year, despite having earned little or no income. A Seedtime Fund grant subsidized the artists and paid for the printing of 120 posters.
5 of them, each by a different artist, are displayed below.
“Food, Money, Shelter: NYC Resources”, booklet, 2016 & 2017
Description of the booklet:
I researched the benefit information, wrote the text and solicited artwork for a booklet, Food, Money, Shelter: NYC Resources; the pages were 8.5” X 11” folded in half. It consisted of 12 information sheets on various NYC benefits, and 12 correspondingly appropriate artworks. During 2016 and 2017, three thousand of these were distributed, free, in food pantries, on the subway, on the streets, & to non-profit agencies and NYC legislators. Funding for printing came from the Seedtime Fund and from organizations that distributed the booklet to their constituents.
Photos of the cover and several page spreads are displayed below.
Email judithrubenstein@yahoo.com for an actual booklet, or the full thing as a pdf.
“How We Got Here: Foodbanks and Streetcorners, UK and US”, booklet, 2017
With funding from The Puffin Foundation, my Design Consultant Meghan Keane and I composed a booklet, HOW WE GOT HERE: Streetcorners & Foodbanks, UK & US. It is, essentially, a coffee table book dedicated to those with no coffee table.
It contains my artwork done as I toured the food-banks of the United Kingdom under a Rosen Foundation fellowship, and as I worked in the soup kitchens of NYC for the past decades. Text was gathered from food-bank volunteers and customers answering my question, “How did you get to be on this corner, needing food charity, or being a volunteer dispensing the stuff?” The booklets were distributed to the participating food banks (the UK word) in the UK, and food pantries (the US word) in NYC.
Photos of the cover and several pages are displayed below.
Email judithrubenstein@yahoo.com for an actual booklet, or the full thing as a pdf.
“NYC: Struggles and Survival Strategies”, booklet, 2019
My goal with this book was to make the point that a variety of us have financial problems – the visible panhandlers, the people paying for their groceries with food stamps, and the middle class families who max out credit cards to cover high rent.
My political hope is that if we see each other as compatriots in the struggle, we will stop scapegoating each other and join in addressing the real powers that keep us all down.
The form the booklet takes is a narrative of my rambling around NYC, describing, in my words and my artwork, New Yorkers who are struggling.
Funding was from More Art, Fund for the City of NY, and the Puffin Foundation.
Below are the cover and several spreads.
Email judithrubenstein@yahoo.com for an actual booklet, or the full thing as a pdf.
Covid 19 NYC: Resources & Reflections,” booklet, Fall 2020
The booklet is a guide to food, housing, health care, and more for New Yorkers in economic trouble during the Covid 19 pandemic of, as of this writing, 2020. It is written simply, meant for people who are not internet savvy but need information in an understandable form. And it is illustrated with my artwork.
5,000 copies of it were printed in October, 2020 with funds from the Seedtime Fund and from the Robin Hood Covid-19 Emergency Fund.
Below are the cover and several page spreads.
Email judithrubenstein@yahoo.com for an actual booklet, or the full thing as a pdf.
“Searching for Home,” 35 varied booklets, 2022, 2023, 2024
Searching for Home is an art project – a series of 5” X 3” rectangles folded into loooong accordion books, filled with drawings and musings about what home means to homeless, housing-insecure and asylum-seeking New Yorkers. AND very securely housed artists and poets, i.e., all regular people. Result: 30 full booklets, each of about 25 pages.
The booklets were inspired by Ted Joans’ Exquisite Corpse accordion book in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, composed as he traveled the world soliciting artists’ pages. My take: I asked tens of NYC street or shelter dwellers to each draw or write something on a rectangle concerning their plight. And I added some contributions by people who are fortunate enough to have homes. Puffin Foundation, In Our Backyard, Henry Street Settlement, and individual donors enabled me to pay $1/page to the contributors.
We exhibited these booklets in libraries and churches, hoping viewers would see the un-housed as thinking, artistic people affected by their tough situations.
Below are several covers and some sample pages.
Journal workshops, with long distance bike riders & African refugees, 2023, 2024
After seeing models of my serious Searching for Home booklets, I taught people how to make their own personal accordion booklets, ones used as journals. I doled out long strips of 6” high paper to be folded into 4” wide rectangles, cardboard for hard covers, newsprint to draw or print on and thus decorate the covers, art supplies and tools. We, together, each made a 10 page book. I showed how to make the booklets longer and wider and more elaborate, using extensions that one can glue on. Product: Each participant went home with an accordion booklet of their own. The journal method was used to get over the angst of a horrid storm-ruined bicycle trip, and the journey from Africa to the NYC shelter system.
Photos are displayed below:
