Friday, July 22nd, at 7:20pm |Directed by Tom Jones | Running time: 1h 18min
“The Real Deal” is a documentary that chronicles the story of how John Malpede left the NYC performance arts scene in the mid ‘80s and landed on LA’s Skid Row, working as an advocate for the homeless. Over three decades, he has transformed what he calls a “hair brained idea”, LAPD, a theater group comprised of the homeless, into a performance art phenomenon.
At the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, 440 S. Broadway, Mezzanine Level, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Followed by a discussion with John Malpede, Founding Artistic Director of Los Angeles Poverty Department.
Movie Nights At The Museum are free, with free popcorn, coffee and conversation.
Parking is available in the same building on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floor.
Take the elevator on the back to the 2nd floor where the Skid Row History Museum & Archive is located
Speaker Bio
John Malpede – Founding Artistic Director LAPD – is an artist and activist. He founded Los Angeles Poverty Department in 1985 while working as an outreach paralegal and evidence gatherer at Skid Row’s Inner City Law Center. Malpede has directed LAPD projects working with communities throughout the US and in the UK, The Netherlands, France, Belgium and Bolivia. Malpede’s “RFK in EKY” (2000-2004) recreated Kennedy’s original “War on Poverty” tour in a four-day, 200-mile series of events that included, performance, installations, and discussion of historic and current social policy. Malpede has received New York’s Bessie Creation Award, SF’ Art Institute’s Kent Award, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a City of Los Angeles’ COLA and California Community Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. As a 2008 Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he produced “Bright Futures” a video installation and live performance about financial engineering and the 2005 economic meltdown.
About Los Angeles Poverty Department
Currently celebrating its 31st year, Los Angeles Poverty Department was the first ongoing arts initiative in Skid Row. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams, and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row. LAPD has created projects with communities throughout the US and in The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Bolivia. LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive project is supported with funding from the Surdna Foundation.
About Skid Row History Museum and Archive
The Skid Row History Museum & Archive is an 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 & 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.
