TALK / LECTURE
Artist Conversations: Raphael Escobar
May 6, 2025 | 7:00PM – 9:00PM
OFF-SITE; SKID ROW HISTORY MUSEUM & ARCHIVE
The Fowler Museum and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) are partnering for a conversation with artist Raphael Escobar, whose work is featured in the exhibition Construction, Occupation. This conversation will be moderated by John Malpede, Founding Artistic Director at the Los Angeles Poverty Department and Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, associate professor and graduate vice chair at the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Raphael Escobar
Since 2007, Raphael Escobar has worked in non-formal arts education settings of social vulnerability and political disputes, including Fundação CASA, a juvenile detention facility, and Cracolândia, an area of downtown São Paulo—with many similarities to Skid Row.Informed by long-term community relationships, Escobar’s work often takes the form of performance and community intervention. His work addresses stigma and class relations; and calls into question a moral system that finds it acceptable to have people living unhoused on the streets.
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is associate professor and graduate vice chair at the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. His research sits between the arts and social sciences, cultural theory and aesthetic practice. Working with activists, curators, and artists in Brazil, Ungprateeb Flynn investigates the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts and theorizes about the production of knowledge, notions of utopia, and social and aesthetic dimensions of form. Through a collaborative methodological approach, he inquires into how human beings express themselves artistically, and in doing so, seek to transform the world.
This program is in partnership with the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)
Construction, Occupation
May 4–January 11, 2026
Construction, Occupation presents the work of 24 artists and collectives that engage art’s potential to shape the city through the power of community. Drawing on myriad visual languages and poetics grounded in collective action, the exhibition investigates a radical urban vocabulary that blurs art and activism to address questions of infrastructure and vulnerability, circulation and segregation, and the body in public space.
Image courtesy of Raphael Escobar.
