The Skid Row History Museum and Archive is an exhibition /performing arts space curated by Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD). The museum and archive foreground the distinctive artistic and historical consciousness of Skid Row and function 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. Onsite exhibitions focus on grassroots strategies that have preserved the neighborhood from successive threats of gentrification and displacement, to be studied for current adaptation and use.
At the moment, the Skid Row History Museum & Archive has an installation, The Back 9 – which is both an installation and performance, by LAPD, looking at the assumptions behind public policy that get decided in private by the rich and politically connected. LAPD’ers democratize the process by playing miniature golf that imagines and critiques the decisions made on The Back 9. The performance takes place on a zoning themed miniature golf course designed by artist Rosten Woo.
This Skid Row History Museum and Archive tour and conversation and will be led by LAPD members and John Malpede.
LAPD is (Henriëtte Brouwers, Christina Collier, Walter Fears, Tom Grode, Chas Jackson, Jamaya Kapri, KevinMichael Key, John Malpede, Lee Maupin, RCB, Larry Swanson, Damitri Taylor, Sherri Walker, Jen Wilson) made up of people who live and work on Skid Row. LAPD creates performances that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD has produced projects working with communities throughout the US and in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Bolivia. Currently LAPD is developing performance ideas and imagining interventions on the topics of community generated public safety and resisting displacement.
John Malpede, is the founding Artistic Director of LAPD. He directs, performs and engineers multi-event arts projects that have theatrical, installation and organizing components. Malpede has taught at UCLA, NYU’s Tisch School Of The Arts, and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance. He is a 2013 recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Fellowship. He is curating the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, an exhibition / performance space dedicated to undermining gentrification and displacement.
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**NOTE** : Child care is available on an as-needed basis. If interested, please email galvez@atlandsedge.com with the number
of children and their ages by Tuesday, October 29th
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at land’s edge is an autonomous pedagogical platform based in East and South Los Angeles that nurtures the voices of cultural producers who are committed to social transformation. We understand pedagogy as not only a method of education, but as a critical space where the processes of teaching and learning, knowledge and action, and self and community are reflexive, interwoven, and oriented toward the liberatory possibilities of a just and democratic world.