NYC artist Zhenya Gershman was walking down a busy Manhattan street one day when she and her family encountered a homeless man holding a sign that read, “I might as well be invisible.” It was then and there that the idea for her next painting series came to her. It would be a spotlight on the homeless.
“It was at that very moment that an idea was born: to paint a whole series of canvases giving visibility to the homeless, making the viewer see them as any human being deserves,” she said. During that same encounter, her husband hugged the man and said, “I see you man.” And in that second moment, the series was given a name: I See You.
The ‘I See You’ art series by Zhenya Gershman The I See You series features 17 homeless people Gershman encountered since moving to NYC last year. She met many of them in the Fashion District, where her studio, Artishouse, is based. The series also includes homeless children living in Los Angeles, which is where the kind-hearted artist lived before moving to the Big Apple.
The paintings are created on canvas using a mixture of oil and empathy. The people in her paintings take center stage. “They are painted almost like icons.
They are iconic,” Gershman, who is also an art teacher, said. Painting since she was a child, Gershman, originally from Eastern Europe, always had a passion for using art to help ease the pains of the world. In addition to her series on the homeless, she started an art movement in 2022 called Brushes Over.