*** For the duration of this exhibition, all related ticket sales include a record release and benefit the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County, supporting communities impacted by anti-immigration legislation and homelessness in South County. ***

As part of the ongoing exhibition The Day That Never Came / El Día Que, Indexical will host a public housing rights protest banner-making workshop led by artist, educator, and University of California, Santa Cruz lecturer Ann Altstatt of The Fabrica.

Developed in collaboration with residents living at the Armory Shelter in Santa Cruz, the workshop centers protest statements, demands, and reflections gathered directly from individuals currently experiencing housing insecurity. These statements, along with banner-making materials, will then be brought into the gallery space at Indexical, where community members and unhoused residents alike will be invited to collectively create hand-made protest banners together.

The workshop expands the exhibition’s ongoing engagement with homelessness not only as a subject of representation, but as a site of collaboration, collective expression, and public visibility. The resulting banners will be donated as tools for future demonstrations, advocacy efforts, and public actions organized by members of the unhoused community and their allies.

By connecting gallery audiences with material forms of advocacy rooted in lived experience, the event asks how art spaces might function as places of solidarity, dialogue, and action.

All materials will be provided. Community members are encouraged to participate regardless of artistic experience.

Ann Altstatt is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores temporality, the intersections of scientific inquiry and mysticism, and the hidden stories of the material world. Their other research interests include paleontology, cosmology, discard studies, human relationships with the non-human, and multi-species survival in the face of global climate chaos. Ann graduated from the Digital Arts and New Media MFA at University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018. As a founding collective member at The Fábrica textile workshop since 2010, their arts practice remains informed by community engagement, collaborative processes, and material reuse. 

The Day That Never Came / El Día Que is a collaborative sound project created through recorded orations by Mace Crowbear, Lisa Bordenave, Julio Lopez, and Sandra Aguilar, interwoven with original sound works by Leshy (Ben Krasner), Briana Marela, Rip Florence, and e-fem.url (Maya Garcia). The project brings forward personal accounts of survival, displacement, memory, addiction, parenthood, and resilience from the unhoused community, forming a layered listening environment of lived testimony. The work unfolds across a quadraphonic sound installation at Indexical's gallery and record release, inviting audiences into the social realities shaping life of people without housing.

Additional elements of the exhibition include The Untitled and Dispossessed, a county-wide mural map illustrating homelessness diaspora by Joy Schendledecker and Ann Altstatt, visual art contributions from Little Giant Collective, and community tabling from the Lived Experience Action Board (LEAB).