We Americans used to call them hobos. The word itself is cute and unthreatening, conjuring up images of the carefree, whistling wanderer with a knapsack on his back. A traveling exhibit, “Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present,” underlines the conceptual differences between then and now, as well as the similarities. For example, the artists sponsored by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA)–the Depression-era government program to create jobs–were themselves mostly from the ranks of the disenfranchised, and often portrayed their poverty-stricken brothers and sisters as noble. Now society calls them the homeless, and generally sees them as mentally ill, drug addicts, drunkards. And the government no longer funds the artists who portray them. Terminology and perceptions have changed.

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