Festival for All Skid Row Artists

The 10th Festival for all Skid Row Artists
Saturday and Sunday, October 26 & 27, 2019
1-5pm each day in Gladys park

Say What! TENth Annual –can you believe it! How Time Flies! How a community vitally sustains itself! You better believe it!

LAPD partners with Studio 526 and United Coalition East Prevention Project (UCEPP) to produce the Festival. This year, the Goethe-Institut is an additional producing partner. The Goethe-Institut is organizing the event series “Worlds of Homelessness”, including discussions, music and film screenings, that begins 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” will open with music by the LA Playmakers and the Playmakers will close 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 have played with a number of well known jazz and pop music figures. They can play anything, R&B, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Gospel– and they do.  The band members have one thing in common. They all were members of the Praise and Worship Team at Skid Row’s Central City Church of the Nazarene.

Festival attendees are invited to participate in a range of artist facilitated workshops and creativity stations. The LA City Department of City Planning will be there to gather community input on their emerging plan for downtown and Skid Row Now & 2040, will also be getting festival-goer input on their community generated plan for a Skid Row future without displacement and with housing for area residents now on the streets. LAPD’s Festival for All Skid Row Artists gives audiences a chance to hear what you usually don’t hear about Skid Row: that it is a community rich with talent!