Helping Homeless Artists Turn Around Their Fortunes

Featured on nytimes.com

In September 2014, Scott Benner, a former heavy equipment operator, was homeless, unemployed and staying at Father Bill’s Place & MainSpring, a shelter in Quincy, Mass.

Fending off a debilitating illness and depression, Mr. Benner spent hours making art, something he had done much of his life. His compelling pen and ink drawings enticed the Boston start-up ArtLifting to add him to its collection of homeless and disabled artists whose work was being featured and sold on its website.

So good was Mr. Benner’s work that Liz Powers, founder of ArtLifting, arranged for a solo gallery show on Boston’s fancy Newbury Street at which several of his pieces were sold for hundreds of dollars.

For Mr. Benner, 58, who lost his job in 2009 and despaired as his marriage broke up and he spiraled into homelessness, the solo show in Boston served as a startling juxtaposition from where he had been to where he might be going.

“When I had that show, I had to get special permission from a counselor at the shelter to stay out beyond 6 p.m.,” he recalled. “There I was with people sipping wine, eating cheese and crackers, and talking about art. And an hour after the show was over, I was on the T going back to Quincy, where I had to turn in my wallet and medications, be searched and then go back into the shelter where guys were fighting and puking and passing out. It was surreal to go from one world to the next.”

A few months after the show, Mr. Benner found subsidized housing on the Maine coast, and last Christmas, ArtLifting sold one of his drawings for $2,500. Like his fellow ArtLifting artists, Mr. Benner said Ms. Powers had played a significant role in turning around his fortunes. “She exudes energy,” he said. “Even though I just met her, I turned over my whole life’s artwork to her because I knew I was in good hands.”

Ms. Powers, a 27-year-old Harvard sociology graduate, founded ArtLifting with her brother Spencer in 2013 after years of searching for a creative way to mitigate the anguish of homelessness. She began working with the homeless as an 18-year-old freshman. “I was flipping pancakes and making eggs at 6:30 in the morning at the shelters, but I didn’t really get to know anyone,” she said.

When she was a sophomore, she joined LIFT, a national nonprofit organization, where she was trained to work with the homeless, helping people grapple with housing issues, unemployment, food access and self-esteem.

During her one-on-one sessions, Ms. Powers heard a familiar refrain. “A lot of our clients said to me, ‘Liz, I’m incredibly lonely,’  ” she said. How, she wondered, could she create a safe space to bring these people together to support one another?

Having been an artist, she combined her passions and urged local shelters to create art groups where their residents could come together, make art and earn one another’s trust. With a public service fellowship from Harvard, she spent a year working on her concept.

What Ms. Powers discovered was that many shelters already had art programs and closets filled with discarded artwork. There was no place to display the work and no obvious use for it once it was completed.

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