Susan Grabel is a New York sculptor, feminist, and social activist who explores the human dimension of social issues in her figurative sculptures. In this work, Grabel reflects on the urban environment: a place where on one block you’ll see boarded up buildings and the next, stretch limos. Commuting to Manhattan to her day job as a computer programmer and systems analyst in the early 1980’s she saw, daily, a homeless man in tattered dirty clothes huddled against a building next to an elegant store window. She was disturbed by the juxtaposition and made a series of works in clay and mixed media on homelessness. At the same time she became involved with Project Hospitality, an organization on Staten Island that provides services to the homeless. She organized and ran workshops for children in the shelter and was part of “Taking Art to Heart," an organization that produced exhibitions and performances to bring awareness of the issues of homelessness to the public. We usually ignore homeless people; they represent the failures of our society and we pass them by as if they were invisible. Using clay and wood in narrative sculptural environments, Grabel captures the desolation and humanity of the homeless, living on the edge of society, surviving as best they can on the streets.