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General Dogon: Screaming Two Wheelers

October 3 – December 18, 2015
@ Skid Row History Museum & Archive
440 S. Broadway, LA, CA 90013

GENERAL DOGON: SCREAMING TWO WHEELERS
The exhibition opening will take place October 3, 2015 from 6 to 9pm.
Open through December 18, 2015.

SRHMA_2015_GeneralDogonBIKESRHM & A’s second visual arts exhibition features works of Skid Row artist General Dogon. Raised on Skid Row and a leading community civil rights activist with LA CAN General Dogon’s creations, tricked out bicycles, will fill the museum space. In addition, the exhibition will feature videos of General Dogon talking about his artistic and activist work in Skid Row.

General Dogon’s spectacular one-of-a-kind bicycles were initially conceived by the artist to gain neighborhood attention and assist his organizing efforts. Numerous public events, will take place at the museum during the course of the exhibition, including an interview with the artist, on a date to be determined.

General Dogon’s work highlights an interest of the Museum to present art objects that also function as activist objects. The Museum’s first iteration, at The Box Gallery in 2008, the exhibition featured 3 objects that had this dual significance: a shopping cart from the Catholic Worker, David Busch’s free speech tent, and Veronica Dolman’s cardboard construction of a Hotel under police siege, the Safer Cities Initiative.

About the Skid Row History Museum and Archive

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.

Funders

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.