May 29 – June 16, 2014 : WALK THE TALK ~ LAPD’s SKID ROW HISTORY EXHIBITION
FREE and open to the public inside the MIKE KELLEY Mobile Homestead in front of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Little Tokyo.

Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead Joins the Parade!
The late artist Mike Kelley was a friend of LA Poverty Department, and we were honored to have his art piece Mobile Homestead—a full-scale, mobile replica of the artist’s original family home in Westland, Michigan—participating in Walk the Talk.

On view inside the Mobile Homestead, LAPD installed historical materials on the making of the Skid Row community. This included the stories of the 36 Skid Row visionaries who were honored in our first Walk the Talk events in 2012, along with their portraits by street artist Mr. Brainwash. Also on display were a timeline of Skid Row history, originally created by LAPD for the 2008 exhibition The Skid Row History Museum at The Box Gallery and since updated for LAPD’s gallery show at New York’s Queens Museum. After 2014’s Walk the Talk, the stories and portraits of this year’s honorees will be added to the exhibition.

Inside, the Mobile Homestead featured an installation of Skid Row history curated by LAPD from LAPD’s Skid Row history timeline: portraits of 36 previous Walk the Talk honorees and other historical materials, which were installed at New York’s Queens Museum retrospective exhibition on the work of Los Angeles Poverty Department, “Do You Want the Cosmetic Version or the Real Deal?: Los Angeles Poverty Department 1985 – 2014”

The Mobile Homestead is permanently housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, where it was Mike Kelley’s wish that the Homestead not simply be an outpost of the museum, but that it represents the cultural interests of the community that exists in proximity to it. The work made its first appearance in Los Angeles in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition, Mike Kelley, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, which opened in April and was on view through July 28. It was the largest exhibition of Mike Kelley’s work to date, bringing together over 250 works, from 1974 through early 2012.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) produced a body of deeply innovative work mining American popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions—which he set in relation to relentless self and social examinations, both dark and delirious. The Mobile Homestead was brought to LA by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts in collaboration with MOCA LA, and MOCA Detroit.