"Art can't get you a home or a job," Hope Sandrow, the founder of the Artist/Homeless Shelter Collaborative, informed her Tuesday night workshop at the Park Avenue Shelter for Homeless Women. "I understand if you say to me, 'How does making art affect my problems?'...But I see this mural and I think about change." The mural she sees is the collaborative effort of artist Keiko Bonk and the shelter residents, and the occasion of Sandrow's pep talk is the rehanging of the four-panel painting on a wall of the shelter's commodious hallway cum activity-room.

The wall leaks, and the inadequate ventilation and TV drone contribute to an air of lassitude familiar to anyone who's spent time in a hospital (or a minimum security prison). But like Bonk & Co.'s exuberantly painted synthesis of the four seasons and the tarot, there is plenty that will surprise visitors to this 120-bed shelter: its swank, Upper East Side location; its surreal setting within the Seventh Regiment Armory, a block-square building housing a posh restaurant and hosting - until recently - the hyperkinetic play Tamara; and especially its population. You'll find no resemblance between these neatly dressed, elderly women and the media image of the homeless exclusively as drug-crazed denizens of the streets. Mostly women of color and former heads of grown-up families, they are victims of gaping holes in the "safety net."

Sandrow has been meeting with the "ladies" weekly since last October. (Volunteers call them ladies, the staff calls them clients.) For a year and half before that, the midcareer photographer ran an art program at a downtown family shelter. She left that shelter, she says, after her newsletter was suspended for a Dukakis endorsement written by a resident. When Barbara Rosenberg, then director of the Park Avenue shelter, offered Sandrow the chance to run a program her own way, she eagerly accepted.

At first she'd say, "I'm an artist, I'm doing a newsletter. Will you talk to me?" And hardly anyone responded. Gradually she broke through the pervasive passivity and isolation. A grant from Polaroid in the form of cameras and film enabled residents to represent the shelter and themselves, in painfully personal photo-grids.

A turning point came in early 1990 when Artforum editor Ida Panicelli asked Sandrow to produce an artist's page for her magazine. Sandrow's photo of a white Styrofoam cup evoked a recent court decision banning begging from the subways and transformed her art. "It was an incredible merging of everything I'm interested in," she notes. "Homelessness, censorship, and the environment."

This fusion of her art and her activism also inspired Sandrow to design an ambitious volunteer program. The NEA urged her to apply for a grant to fund artist involvement in an ongoing project, which necessitated a formally structured organization. In August, Sandrow received a $17,000 matching grant from the NEA, after having (successfully) approached collectors, including Adrian Mnuchin and Betsy Cohn, for modest financial support. Additional funding has also come from Visual AIDS (of which I am a member), Art in General, and the Alternative Museum, which provided money to produce the works about homelessness hanging in its current show. (To meet her budget and match the grant, $21,000 must be raised by May 1991.)

What's Sandrow been doing with the money? Three artist grants have been awarded by the selection committee: to Bonk; to Pepon Osorio for a Caribbean-inspired fabric installation in the TV room; and to Juli Carson and Aaron Keppel for a poster titled Self Taught/Self Represented: Homeless Women and AIDS, which will be distributed for the AIDS-directed Day Without Art on December 1. The selection committee hopes to award nine more $1000-plus artist grants during the next year. (Proposals may be sent to Sandrow c/o the Gracie Mansion Gallery.)

The poster was created in response to weekly presentations by the Women's Health Education Project and ACT UP's housing committee. "The women gave us the content and we provided the design," Keppel tells me. To write the poster's lengthy text the group discussed AIDS issues. "They didn't always go along with every subject we brought up, but there was agreement about focusing on the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] and prochoice," Carson noted. One question this savvy poster asks is, "Homeless people can vote, why can't they go into clinical trials?"

This is art meant not to entertain, but to empower, and that buzzword has real meaning in connection with sometimes illiterate shelter residents confronting a daunting and inefficient city bureaucracy. Calling Sandrow's program "one of the best things that ever happened to me," 58-year-old resident Geraldine Womack is learning to read and write, and plans to study word processing. Womack, whose eldest daughter and son-in-law recently died of AIDS-related causes, was a mainstay of the poster project and has joined ACT UP.

Former shelter director Rosenberg observes that "many of these women have a hard time verbally; Hope [Sandrow] makes contact." Rosenberg's successor, Marie Brodie, adds that the Artist/Homeless Shelter Collaborative "encourages clients to express their feelings and raises their self-esteem." Sandrow recently received approval for a program to train shelter residents to teach art to the children from Rosenberg's Jackson Family Residence, a venture that will bring badly needed job references and small salaries. It can, Sandrow believes, "change lives."

Sandrow's tenacity and enthusiasm have begun to inspire the involvement of other art world types. Volunteer artists Carolyn Carpenter, Patsy Craig, Manijeh Ladjeverdi, and Ulf Skogsbergh are regulars. Grey Art Gallery director Tom Sokolowski recently lectured at the shelter after residents visited his show of contemporary Japanese art. Among the most active new participants is the New Museum of Contemporary Art curator France Morin, who has planned museum trips, enlisted her colleagues Gary Sangster and Susan Cahan, and is currently helping organize a fund-raising board.