Walk the Talk Archive, a people’s history of Skid Row LA, website Launch.Designed by Robert Ochshorn and hosted by REDUCT Video.https://app.reduct.video/lapd/walk-the-talk/ The WALK the TALK Archive is now available on-line, celebrating SKID ROW VISIONARIES with interviews, performances, scripts, portraits, commentary. This just launched, dedicated website provides on-line access to the Walk the Talk Archive, a people’s history of Skid Row Los Angeles. The website highlights initiatives by 68 people living and working in Skid Row, whose works from 1970 until today, have contributed to building the Skid Row neighborhood through active civic engagement and profound, visionary initiatives. These initiatives, and the many community members who’ve worked on them, have ensured the survival of Skid Row, Los Angeles a low-income residential neighborhood, the site of many indispensable social services and the place where recovery happens. Without their efforts Skid Row would have been bulldozed long ago and all its residents displaced with nowhere to go, and the services dismantled. Walk the Talk, 2012-2020, Los Angeles Poverty Department’s biennial performance / parade was initiated to make this history visible. The project begins with a community nominating process and interviews of the honorees. Their words are shaped into scenes performed by LAPD during the performance /parade at each honoree’s work site. The parade is propelled through the streets of Skid Row by a New Orleans style brass band with visually arresting, artist designed portraits of each honoree held aloft by community members. The website is created by artist / technologist Robert Ochshorn, and hosted on his company, Reduct Video’s platform, with all content from Walk the Talk. Robert Ochshorn has generated a uniquely navigable archive. It includes all the hour-plus interviews (both as transcripts and videos) of the 68 honorees. The site allows simultaneous video viewing and transcript reading of all the Walk the Talk honorees. By clicking on any word or paragraph in the transcript the video immediately jumps to that spot so that you can search through the interviews and performances. The entire site is searchable so that you can aggregate the thoughts of all honorees on any theme from ‘housing’ to ‘policing’ to ‘compassion’. And the archive includes scripts of all of the performances created from the interviews and presented in the biennial Walk the Talk parades. The site is now live. For the next year we are inviting one scholar, community activist, or artist to engage with the site and generate a 5-minute response, that will be added to the site – as well as widely distributed via social media. The first response from ACLS-Mellon Society & Scholars Fellow and UCR history professor, Cathy Gudis is now available, with Ananya Roy, Director of UCLA’s Luskin School Center on Inequality & Democracy, and Street Symphony Director Vijay Gupta, and Vancouver housing activists of the Right to Remain Collective coming in July, August, September. They will be followed by Professor Michele Lancione of Urban Institute at Sheffield University, U.K., and Kim Welch, Professor of Theater, University of Missouri, St. Louis, in October and November with other responders yet to be determined for December 2010 through May 2021. Walk the Talk is a peoples’ history of the community. LAPD tells the rest of the story, what you don’t hear elsewhere: the story of the community as told by the community. Walk the Talk supports LAPD’s larger social practice methodology, a body of acclaimed work widely acknowledged as “some of the most uncompromising political theater” (C. Carr, Artforum) and “Best political art shows” (Catherine Wagley, LA WEEKLY). The website is made possible through the creativity and generous support of REDUCT Video, Inc. Walk the Talk, 2020 is made possible with support from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, the LA County Department of Arts and Culture and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Calendar exhibit / events / movies Skid Row History Museum and Archive EXHIBITION : How to House 7000 People In Skid Row. 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. Tired of promises and no solutions to L.A.’s housing crisis? At the exhibition, learn together and in public how housing works and could work in L.A. March 7 - August 29A coalition of Skid Row community members and groups have created “Skid Row Now & 2040” a plan that identifies funding sources to house people who have extremely low incomes. The exhibition created by Woo with Kobara, Brouwers & Malpede makes the solutions in the plan graphically legible.Additional public events will take place during the run of the exhibition. The project “How to House 7,000 People in Skid Row” is supported with funding from A Blade of Grass, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support provided by an Engaging Humanities Grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute. SKID ROW ARTISTS CREATIVELY CONNECT WHILE PHYSICALLY DISTANCED In response to COVID-19, The Skid Row Arts Alliance, a consortium of Skid Row Arts Organizations (Urban Voices Project, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Street Symphony, Piece By Piece, Studio 526), has brought their programming online and into the community with various immediate relief efforts. The arts are a lifeline for many in the Skid Row community. Normally, one of the strengths of the Skid Row community is that people interact face to face. As social distancing rules leave us all in isolation, maintaining connection is essential. Recognizing this health and social crisis’s acute impact on the residents of Skid Row, The Skid Row Arts Alliance has initiated a multi-pronged response. · Leeav Sofer, Artistic Director for Urban Voices Project with Daniel Villa of Piece by Piece and Clancey Cornell have created a web page: "Skid Row Arts TV Guide” that provides a weekly calendar of on-line Skid Row arts activities with culturally literate instructions on how to connect created by The intention is to promote neighborhood based #Connectivity as best as possible in the face of #COVID-19 and the hardships of social distancing. All Programs are accessible by either calling in, through Facebook Live, Zoom or Youtube. These resources are being distributed to all Skid Row residences from the tents to SRO tenants. · Sofer created a website that provides the most accurate information in the county on the availability of shelter beds and food access in response to a gap of intercommunication between city and county organizations. www.homelesscovidresource.com. · We distributed our second Arts Care Package to artists in the community who are regular attendees of these programs. Packages include a Skid Row Arts TV Guide Magazine, with offerings from each organization, art supplies, headphones, masks and more. Support included from USC Arts in Action program and Roski School of Art & Design. Skid Row has a dynamic arts community. In Skid Row people make art where they are, on the street, in parks, in tents, missions and hotel rooms. Last year the Skid Row Arts Alliance created the Skid Row Arts Map. The map recognized arts as a community connector and identified the times and locations of all the arts activities that are free and open to anyone living in Skid Row. The Skid Row Arts Alliance, is a consortium of: Urban Voices Project, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Street Symphony, Piece by Piece, Studio 526. This project is the second collaboration between the Skid Row Arts Alliance and USC Arts in Action program who partnered with the SRAA to create the Skid Row Arts Map last year. Additional organizations participating in these efforts are: Creative I Community Arts Space and The Los Angeles Community Action Network . Read the LA WEEKLY article about the Skid Row Arts Map. About Free Movie Nights at The Museum Every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month, at 7pm, we screen movies about issues that are important to our Skid Row and downtown community at the #skidrowmuseum. About Los Angeles Poverty Department LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive is an exhibition /performing arts space curated by L. A. Poverty Department. It foregrounds the
distinctive artistic and historical consciousness of Skid Row and 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. Support the work of the LAPD! Your donation helps us to continue our group devised performances, our annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists, our biennial Walk the Talk parade and the Skid Row History Museum and Archive — for creating social change. Phone / Fax: website: Skid Row History Museum & Archive Open Thu Fri Sat 2-5pm Mailing address: |