Festival for All Skid Row Artists

Get ready for the next – 18th – FESTIVAL FOR ALL SKID ROW ARTISTS!
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24 & 25, 2026
EACH DAY FROM 1-4PM IN GLADYS / GENERAL JEFF PARK (corner of 6thStreet and Gladys Avenue).
The festival is a grassroots cultural event where over 150 Skid Row Artists perform or display their artwork to enthusiastic audiences.

Presented by the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) the festival is two days of live non-stop music and performance, visual art, and participatory art workshops, showcasing the diverse talents of Skid Row residents.

Los Angeles Poverty Department celebrates and preserves the rich artistic heritage of Skid Row and beginning with the first Festival in 2009 has generated a registry of Skid Row artists, which now numbers over 1,000. LAPD is a theater company comprised people living in Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

In memoriam Linda Harris, performing her favorite song, “I Hope You’ll Dance”.

Downloadable PDF's of the tabloid newsletter of each festival

Making the Case for Skid Row Culture
Festival Newsletters
- 2025
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010

Making the Case for Skid Row Culture

In 2010, Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, released “Making a Case for Skid Row Culture: Findings from a Collaborative Inquiry by the Los Angeles Poverty Department and the Urban Institute”. This study by John Malpede (Los Angeles Poverty Department) and Mario Rosario Jackson (Urban Institute) documents the role of arts and culture in Skid Row. This study found that culture comes from the ground up in Skid Row and is often initiated by residents and resident driven initiatives. This festival is undertaken to recognize these people and initiatives and to stimulate a new way of envisioning and talking about this neighborhood.

open 'Making the Case for Skid Row Culture'

Festival for All Skid Row Artists 2010 - 2025

16th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 18 & 19, 2025 in General Jeff / Gladys park

click to open 2025 festival newsletter

2024

15th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 26 & 27, 2024 in Gladys park

click to open 2024 festival newsletter

For two days each year in Skid Row, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) brings artists and grassroots organizations doing transformative work in the neighborhood together in Gladys / General Jeff Memorial Park. This gathering is known as the Festival for All Skid Row Artists. And now it’s 15 years strong! You know why? Because the festival exhibits greatness and it is an historically significant occasion. The Festival is nothing short of LEGENDARY. This year’s festival in particular was exciting. There were 65 performances on the legendary stage at General Jeff Memorial Park! This can’t happen without the amazing people involved.

2023

14th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 28 &29, 2023 in Gladys park

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… But to truly understand this year’s Festival for All Skid Row Artists, and all those in the past and all those in the future, simply ponder the photograph. The smiles, the joy, the sense of belonging. The community. Perhaps you know the majority of the people in this photograph. Perhaps you are in it yourself. Perhaps you know very few of them because this was your first time attending the Festival and it was like entering a whole new world. None of that matters. What matters is what this photograph captures the universal desire for family and community. For creativity, love, joy, peace, hope. Those desires are in the Middle East. They are in Ukraine. They are universal. And so, are they in Skid Row? OF COURSE THEY ARE. They are in Skid Row in ways that take your breath away. — By om Grode

2022

13th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 29 & 30, 2022 in Gladys park

click to open 2022 festival newsletter

It’s art time again, well at least in Skid Row it is. This time every year the Festival For All Skid Row Artists brings light to the hearts of the city’s most vulnerable. This is done through the efforts of the Los Angeles Poverty Department. LAPD is a theater troupe, started by John Malpede as a performance workshop in 1985. The Poverty Department has helped the flflame of ART stay alive in the minds and hearts of the city’s most forgot- ten, so the world could know; you can have value no matter the situation. This year was special for many reasons. For starters this is the fifirst year the festival was back to its two-day schedule since the pandemic made us all go inside of ourselves. The festival has happened for thirteen years, but this year it felt new. I like to call this year’s festival The Great Reset. — By Adrian Excel

2021

12th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 16, 2021 in Gladys park

click to open 2021 festival newsletter

We called this year, “the half-way back festival” as it took place live in – as this year’s festival MC Coach Ron would say, “…in world famous, Gladys Park, in world famous Skid Row.” –but on one day rather than the customary two. That meant we packed one performance on top of another. Many artists who have performed at the festival for years were eager to be back. Lee Maupin, a well-known performer in Skid Row who does James Brown dance moves including the splits— graciously gave up his time slot to accommodate newcomers who’d just found out about the Festival days before when a dozen LAPD’ers fanned out through the neighborhood going tent to tent looking for singers, dancers, actors and visual artists. And we found them, the rappers –Young Kilo and Ayoo Duce, Divine Being who read a pretty profound text and Kenneth Ross, who brought his abstract paintings on wood from around the block where he’d had them propped up against a metal fence.

2020

11th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 17, 2020 livestream in Gladys park

Due to the pandemic, this year’s festival took a hybrid form:
streaming live on FaceBook and YouTube and in person (limited attendance – masks mandatory) with physically distancing in Gladys park and at Studio 526.
In this extraordinary time, many artists have filmed their acts and works of art to get in the mix of the vibrant Skid Row artistic culture on the live-stream.

* MC Chella Coleman introduced the videos Skid Row artists had submitted and interviewed artists via live video.
* At STUDIO 526 several artists painted a collaborative PAINTING and asked for input during the live stream.
* The entire live-stream was projected on a big screen in Gladys Park where MC Charles Porter gave updates with some live performances.

2019

10th Festival for All Skid Row Artists
October 26 & 27, 2019 in Gladys park

click to open 2019 festival newsletter

This year, the Goethe-Institut was an additional producing partner. The Goethe-Institut organized the event series “Worlds of Homelessness”, including discussions, music and film screenings, that began Tuesday October 22, at LA Poverty Department’s Skid Row History Museum & Archive (with additional sites at Sci-Arc and Navel). The project brings together local and international artists, architects, scholars and others and culminates with the 2 days of the Festival.

“Worlds of Homelessness” opened with music by the LA Playmakers and they closed out the Festival on Sunday afternoon. The LA Playmakers are a local band founded by Joseph Warren and Stan Watson 5yrs ago. These accomplished professional musicians can play anything, R&B, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Gospel– and they do. All the band members were members of the Praise and Worship Team at Skid Row’s Central City Church of the Nazarene.