The first time Jody Wood ever set foot in an art museum was as a college student. Needless to say, the mixed-medium artist never foresaw herself in this field. Now, she’s using her art as a driving mechanism for change, one city at a time. A newly minted Houston resident, Wood brings her almost two decades’ worth of social justice–centered art to her new city with a project tackling H-town’s housing crisis.

NFS Real Estate is an art project that centers on five Houston residents dealing with the brunt of the city’s housing policies. According to the Eviction Lab, filings for eviction in Houston in the past year are two and a half times the average. Wood’s initiative seeks to address this problem through tangible community effort.

The NFS (Not For Sale) website is designed to simulate a real estate webpage. Each listing replicates the homes of the tenants facing eviction, but instead of looking to buy or rent, visitors can make donations to the tenants to help with their housing expenses for the month by buying framed artwork. The intimacy of the listings, made in collaboration with the residents, is a purposeful attempt to cut the transactional relationship between potential buyers of the homes and people facing eviction.

“Most real estate photographs are very polished, and these are not,” Wood explains. “These are cozy and intimate photographs because they’re not meant to be a place that is going to be lived in by another person. We’re meant to show the viewer that this house should belong to this person and it’s important that they stay in a house.”

NFS is not Wood’s first foray into the world of art-based activism. As a graduate student at the University of Kansas in 2006, Wood created Beauty in Transition, an art project for which she converted a box truck into a salon on wheels, offering free hair styling to residents of homeless shelters with the help of volunteer hairdressers.

“That project was all about touch and creating intimacy where there wasn't any,” Wood says. “I think that when people become [economically] dependent in the US, they're kind of treated like they're not a whole person anymore. There's a limitation of autonomy.”

Unfortunately, the initial response to Beauty in Transition was not particularly favorable.

“People hated it in Kansas,” Wood says, laughing. “They were like, ‘This is not art!’ But I got better at asserting myself to say, ‘No, this is art.’ This is why I think it's important that art does these things, and that art gets out of the studio.”

Almost a decade later, Wood successfully relaunched Beauty in Transition in various states across the country including Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. She went on to create Choreographing Care, a show utilizing workshops where staff at homeless shelters reframed care activities with performative art and exercises drawn from actors, and then Social Pharmacy, a solo exhibit where participants from the same locale formed a living library of shared health regimens, transforming individual health remedies into collaborative ones.

Even though Wood grew up without much care for art, her compassion for those condemned by society’s ills that is now ever-present in her work stems from her childhood. The daughter of a mortician, Wood was raised with an understanding of the stigma surrounding death and the loneliness it brings those at the end of their lives. This interest in marginalized populations leads her to create works centering these groups and focused on humanizing them.

Chad Kautzer, professor of philosophy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and curator of Not Exactly, an exhibit where Beauty in Transition appeared in Denver, says the magic of Wood’s work lies in her approach to interacting with these individuals.

“Jody is able to walk this line of engaged social practice art in a way that is attentive to the needs of the populations that she's engaging with, and not sentimentalizing, trivializing, or romanticizing [their lives],” he says.

NFS Real Estate is a perfect example of Wood’s approach. Many of the pictures shown on the website are captured by the residents themselves, allowing them the ability to tell their own stories and give room for the humanity and emotion it strives to create.

The project, in some ways, is also a love letter to Houston. Holland Martin, a 31-year-old photographer who is one of the tenants featured on the website, says the piece is a reminder to locals to interact with the less blissful aspect of living in the city.

“[Houstonians] care so much about our persona of family and friendliness and inclusivity, and I don't think enough Houstonians realize how bad [the housing issue is],” Martin says. NFS Real Estate “grounds people into realizing this isn't just some stranger or some faceless person, but the person next door who is afraid of being on the street tomorrow.”

Wood’s work with Houston’s housing-insecure population in NFS Real Estate is just the start. She plans on continuing the series with a new phase that will potentially deal with the collective ownership of artwork. In the meantime, she will continue to change the world one class at a time as a professor in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University.

Wood’s commitment to advocating for social justice promises a future of impactful projects that will challenge conventions and inspire meaningful dialogue, in the same way NFS Real Estate reminds Houstonians that behind every eviction notice is a human face.