The exhibition asks where making home happens: in a house, a body, a memory, a room, a relationship, or in the forms people make together when home is hard to find.

Where Is Home? brought work from House and Home (2012), The Work We Do While Doing Our Work (2018), Coming Home / Self-Care Writing (2024), and Homecoming: Writing, Making, Belonging (2026) into relation. Rather than treating housing instability as the subject of other people’s lives, the installation made a structure in which questions of home, safety, memory, embodiment, connection, and belonging could sit beside one another.

The exhibition was developed for the Housing Matters Conference with Cunningham Township Supervisor’s Office and support from the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center.

The structure was part of the work.

Sixteen individually composed 8.5 × 11-inch broadsides combined poems, text, photographs, maps, drawings, prints, and archival imagery. They were installed in faux four-pane window frames on freestanding easels, so that the viewer moved around and between the work rather than encountering it as a flat sequence on a wall.

The easels were built by Boyd Porter Reynolds from reclaimed construction lumber, including white pine, southern yellow pine, and 1/4-inch lauan plywood. Paper, vellum, wood, rope, printed text, and the visible language of windows and shelter connected the installation materially to the earlier projects it carried forward.

Lower panels remained available during the conference for visitors to write or leave their own responses to the question of home. The installation therefore remained unfinished in a deliberate sense: it included a place for another person to enter the form.

The work is collaborative by design.

The exhibition was assembled from a closed corpus of participant and archival work. Existing poems, images, prints, maps, and documentation were selected, cropped, enlarged, excerpted, layered, and sequenced. Copyright remained with the artists and writers. Permission, credit, anonymity, and the right to decide how work was named were part of the curatorial structure.

The sequence moved among homelessness, memory, family, the body, place, freedom, and return without requiring those experiences to resolve into a single story. The final hinge—“Nobody can make it out here alone.”—placed relation rather than individual recovery at the end of the exhibition.

With thanks for studio help through labor, thought, or care to Michael Brün, Edward Dietkus, Boyd Porter Reynolds, Stefan Brün, and Lara Waldrop.

Sponsored by Cunningham Township, with support from UCIMC. Thank you to Housing Action Illinois for the opportunity to present Where Is Home? — Mapping Safety, Connection, and Belonging at its conference.

The exhibition was installed in the Connections Room at the I Hotel Conference Center on September 29, 2026, for the Housing Matters Conference.