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Ten states already visited, collecting stories, meeting people on the streets, and the communities that support them locally.
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Understanding not just the people living without homes, but the communities determined to support them every day.
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Compassion in action. People helping to better the lives of others
You have watched the homelessness crisis grow for years, in your city, across the country, and you have felt the pull of two competing impulses: the desire to help, and the fear that nothing you do will be enough. The problem feels vast. The faces feel anonymous. The statistics feel numbing.
Invisible Nation exists to help change this.
For more than twenty years, San Diego artist and printmaker Neil Shigley has walked the streets of cities across America. Sitting with people, learning their names, hearing their stories, and spending hours carving their faces into large-scale block prints that cannot be ignored. These are not images of suffering meant to provoke guilt. They are portraits of human beings carrying nobility, beauty, strength, and vulnerability, demanding to be seen as exactly that.
Invisible Nation was established to help make this happen.
The Invisible Nation project is an ambitious, multi-year undertaking: one portrait, one deep-dive video interview with the subject, and one interview with a frontline service provider in all fifty states. The result will be a national archive of chronic homelessness in America, told in the faces and voices of the people living it.
Shigley has already visited ten states, The journey has only begun.
see
Encounter a portrait. Meet a human being you would have walked past. Feel the ground shift slightly beneath your assumptions.
hear
Listen to a story told in someone's own words, the circumstances, the humanity, the complexity behind the face.
act
Direct your resources, your voice, and your influence toward the organizations fighting this crisis on the front lines, in communities across the country.
"Where attention goes, energy flows. My deepest hope is that this work reminds people that those experiencing homelessness are not invisible, they are us."
— Neil Shigley
Invisible Nation stands for something simple and enormous:
Help us bring these stories to light and provide resources to those in need through the power of art.