CURRENT EXHIBITION
March 7 through 2021
by appointment
info@lapovertydept.org
Exhibition created by Rosten Woo
with Anna Kobara, Henriëtte Brouwers, John Malpede
How to house 7,000 people in Skid Row?
We’re talking about housing everyone now living on the streets of Skid Row –and more.
At the exhibition, learn together and in public how housing works and could work in L.A.
For details visit Facebook Event
The “Skid Row Now & 2040” plan, created by a coalition of Skid Row community members and groups, identifies funding sources to house people who have extremely low incomes. We’re going to look at the plan–and additional ideas for funding housing that will get people off the streets and into housing.
Two artists who make bold fanciful paintings and sculptures in their downtown Los Angeles Hotel-room studios.
READ MOREThe elements of the exhibition: illustrations and narrative from Adrian Riskin’s California Public Records Act inquiry from his blog michaelkohlhaas.org; documents of the entire process provided by the Skid Row Neighborhood Council (SRNC) Formation Committee; videos of different stages of the civic process by Linus Shento and photos and ephemera from the SRNC campaign.
A playable educational golf course about zoning and redevelopment politics in Downtown LA. Each hole of the course explores a different aspect of zoning and its political implications. Specifically the course connects with the planned DTLA2040 rezoning plan which will have dramatic effects on Skid Row. Designed by Rosten Woo, in collaboration with LAPD.
A public, participatory photographic project by Clayton Campbell. In workshops, participants are asked to identify words they have learned since 9-11, or words they knew but have taken on different meanings. Their portraits while holding their words on signs are then photographed on site and placed directly into the installation.
read moreThe exhibition by Lamp Art Project features the works of a diverse group of more than 40 Skid Row artists, working in a variety of media. The majority of the works have been created specifically for this exhibition. Salem Rose, the artist who submitted the title, explains: “It’s an art walk (of sorts), walking also implies that we are moving forward. ‘Dream’ implies drive, determination, as well as recreation and restoration of aspirations.”
The exhibition features portraits, interviews, transcripts and ‘Walk The Talk’ performance scripts and videos of 52 people who have lived and worked in Skid Row and have been instrumental in creating a neighborhood in which the interests of its low income residents are prioritized and their voices heard.
In 1973 “The Blue Book,” was adopted by the city, in part as a strategy that would “contain” poor people in one corner of downtown. Significantly, it had the reverse effect of also preventing upscale development within Skid Row.
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive is an exhibition /performing arts space curated by Los Angeles Poverty Department. 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.
Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive is supported with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual 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.© 2021 lapovertydept.org. Los Angeles Poverty Department
