In keeping with the intellectual tradition and the cultural history of rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance, LAPD’s rent parties take the form of salons featuring local scholars and also feature food, drink and live jazz. Admission is by donation ($15 suggested), with all proceeds directly supporting the museum.
We are planning a rent party for each month, so stay tuned!!
Rent parties developed during the Harlem Renaissance as a means for Black tenants in the area, often targets of discriminatory rent pricing as well as low wages, to make ends meet. These events centered around living room concerts and were known to feature such luminaries as Fats Waller.
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive is a pop-up exhibition /performing arts space curated by LAPD. It foregrounds the distinctive artistic and historical consciousness of Skid Row, a 40-year-old social experiment. The Skid Row History Museum and Archive functions as a means for exploring the mechanics of displacement in an age of immense income inequality, by mining a neighborhood’s activist history and amplifying effective community strategies. The space operates as an archive, exhibition, performance and meeting space. Exhibitions will focus on grassroots strategies that have preserved the neighborhood from successive threats of gentrification and displacement, to be studied for current adaptation and use.
The space is activated by performances, community meetings and films addressing gentrification and displacement locally, nationally and globally. The culture that developed here on Skid Row—an activist culture, artistic culture and recovery culture—offers a useful model for other communities navigating gentrification pressures. The museum space also serves as a literal and artistic common ground, a welcoming space for Angelenos to meet and mingle and explore civic issues together.
In a second museum space an extensive archive of Skid Row History (planning documents, articles, videos, audios, interview transcripts etc.), are available for casual and scholarly research. Visitors will be able to access this archive, comment upon it and use it to further explore the show’s themes.
LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive project is supported with funding from the California Arts Council’s Creative California Communities Program, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts.
The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project, is a series of public conversations and activities centered around the real-time, site-specific intermedia performance that recreated, on September 9th and 10th 2004, Robert Kennedy’s two-day, 200 mile “poverty tour” of southeastern Kentucky in 1968. An Appalshop project directed by John Malpede.Visit the Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project web site.© 2023 lapovertydept.org. Los Angeles Poverty Department
