delight. “I knew when I began to take photographs that the direct gaze was going to be of great importance,” explains Strauss, an installation artist and longtime political activist who, in 1995, established the Philadelphia Public Art Project (PAP), her one-woman organization dedicated to making art an essential part of urban life. Working as the PAP, she created temporary murals on abandoned buildings and constructed tableaux that deliriously staged collisions of facts and fallacies: in her studio she assembled the Whirlforce Medical Research Lab (1997), a faux center for scientific study complete with outdated textbooks and biology dissecting kits; two years earlier, on the wall of a local building, she painted a celestial map, a diagram of invented constellations, connecting luminous stars named for archetypal characters—including “cowards, brave guys, stools and snitches, nice people, bastards, sonsabitches”—drawn from a 1943 list written by Woody Guthrie.
Strauss is a streetwise conceptualist with a clear understanding that art can be made by any means necessary. In 2000, when she decided to produce a large-scale installation beneath the interstate highway that traverses her South Philadelphia neighborhood, she started taking photographs. Since then, for one afternoon in May, Strauss has presented Under I-95, her ten-year public project, an annual solo exhibition featuring 231 ink-jet prints displayed on the 231 concrete pillars supporting the relentless roadway overhead. “Every photo has to be strong and evocative and stand on its own,” she says. “And the images need to fit into a larger, epic narrative reflecting the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Voraciously observed and exactingly edited, the Under I-95 images depict a vibrant intersection of time, place, and eternity where experience occurs: a boy flips in midair above a wobbling stack of tattered mattresses; a sign for Gaslight Square, an ominous tangle of gothic script, hangs against a bland white brick wall; and a young raven-haired woman, her features obscured under heavy black makeup, turns to look assuredly into the camera.
“I'm so glad to be back in the greatest city in the world, my hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!” declared Strauss recently on her free-ranging website, which bursts with knockout images, righteous indignation, and boundless joy.  Born in Philadelphia in 1970, she was raised and educated there in the public schools and the city’s outstanding museums. Strauss has given shout-outs to Marcel Duchamp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (“Duchamp = Da Champ!”); the Mutter Museum, with its collection of medical anomalies; and the venerable Franklin Institute, a science center and home to the Giant Heart. “I’ve always had the same interests,” she confided to director David Kessler and a group of teen filmmakers in If You Break the Skin You Must Come In, a 2007 documentary about her work, “which is being interested in everything.”