WALK THE TALK - PUBLIC ARTWORKS

WALK THE TALK is a peripatetic performance - with brass band - that travels through Skid Row with performances that celebrate the achievements of neighborhood visionaries. LAPD tells the stories of these 36 people in the places where they lived and worked, to bring the history of the community to life and keep it alive. With Community Redevelopment Agency, LAPD is creating permanent public artworks designed by Mr. Brainwash, with images of neighborhood residents whose visionary actions have contributed to re-knitting the social fabric of Skid Row.

Background information about LAPD and the project:
Los Angeles Poverty Department has been working in Los Angeles’ Skid Row since 1985, offering free performance workshops, cultural and educational activities and events with and for the city’s most disenfranchised and forgotten. At the time of its creation LAPD was the first theater for and by homeless people in the nation and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles.  The original goals, still among current goals of the project, are to create community on Skid Row and to employ the voices of the people who live on Skid Row to communicate the experience of living there to the larger community of Los Angeles and to the nation.

“The Los Angeles Poverty Department, despite the homeless status of many of its members, has thrived for years from its downtown outpost and continues to offer theater that’s often stunning in its honesty and lacking in pretension,” --- Constance Monaghan, LA WEEKLY (1997).

LAPD recognizes that the development of Skid Row as a viable, multi-resourced neighborhood is the civic manifestation of, and the necessary condition for the continued dignified, personal development of individuals.

A significant portion of Los Angeles Poverty Department's work, especially since 2000, has been concerned with documenting and reporting back on the development of the Skid Row community. Starting with the LAPD 2002 installation / performance series Is there History on Skid Row? and continuing with 2006 to 2011 activities: UTOPIA/ dystopia, Skid Row History Museum, Skid Row Wall of Fame and Walk the Talk, LAPD has designed a variety of art events that bring together and make visible the cultural assets, both institutional and individual, of the neighborhood.
During UTOPIA / dystopia LAPD created events that engaged community brainpower to identify initiatives and people who had made positive contributions to the neighborhood. We invited some of the most widely recognized social visionaries from the neighborhood, and they were asked to speak about other people and initiatives that they valued. The input led to the installation, Skid Row History Museum, at The Box Gallery, which included more performance and public conversation events, to solicit further community input.