The museum and gallery sector has had a terse relationship with vagrancy and homelessness. It would seem that industry proprietors are more likely to hose a homeless person off their steps than pay homage to them through an exhibition.
While some artworks may not be explicitly about vagrancy, there is historical precedent of homeless artists being celebrated by the sector. The intermittent vagrancy of Vincent van Gogh was a reflection of psychiatric illness as much as poverty. While the transition from the gutter to the Guggenheim made by Jean-Michel Basquiat may reflect a shift in race relations. During his adolescence, the US painter of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent lived out of a cardboard box in a park in New York City. Similarly, Tracey Emin of the YBAs (Young British Artists) experienced homelessness at the height of second wave feminism in the early 1960s.
