440 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013 ~ Mezzanine Level
Rent Parties: Saturday, May 2, 7–10 p.m. and June 6, 7–10 p.m. at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive
Los Angeles Poverty Department is pleased to announce a series of rent parties celebrating the history of the arts in Los Angeles and art as a tool for survival.
LAPD's rent parties will feature local scholars speaking on various aspects of L.A.’s Jazz Age history.
Admission is by donation ($15 suggested), with all proceeds directly supporting the museum.
Our first rent party on Saturday, May 2, will feature Skid Row's own Alex Rodriguez Jazz Quartet and Dr. Kenneth Marcus, a musician and a historian at the University of La Verne, where he also chairs the International Studies program.
Rent parties developed during the Harlem Renaissance as a means for black tenants in the area, often targets of discriminatory rent pricing as well as low wages, to make ends meet. These events centered around living room concerts and were known to feature such luminaries as Fats Waller. In keeping with the cultural history of rent parties, LAPD’s events will also feature food, drink and live jazz.
As a cultural historian, Marcus has written primarily on arts and culture in Southern California, as well as on the state and arts patronage in early modern Germany and Switzerland. His most recent book is Musical Metropolis: Los Angeles and the Creation of a Music Culture, 1880-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan). Marcus will put the rent party into historical context and explore often overlooked connections between L.A.’s vibrant Jazz Age art scene and the Harlem Renaissance.
Post talk, Skid Row’s own jazz band the Alex Rodriguez Quartet will perform for the crowd, who’ll be encouraged to meet and mingle as food and drink is served. The Alex Rodriguez Quartet has performed at LAPD’s Festival For All Skid Row Artists, among other venues, and an excerpt from their performance is available on YouTube. Each October, the Festival for All Skid Row Artists showcases the diverse range of talents hidden on L.A.’s Skid Row.
About the Skid Row History Museum & 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 will be activated by performances, community meetings and films, addressing gentrification and displacement locally, nationally and globally.
About the Los Angeles Poverty Department
Currently celebrating its 30th year, Los Angeles Poverty Department was the first ongoing arts initiative on 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 California Arts Council’s Creative California Communities Program, The Surdna Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts.
office: 213-413 1077
Public Conversation: Making the Case for a Skid Row Neighborhood Council: a conversation with Activists General Jeff (Skid Row) and Fred Dewey (Public Space)
Monday May 4, 2015 from 6:30 - 8:00 PM
at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive ~ 440 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013 ~ Mezzanine Level
The Los Angeles Poverty Department is pleased to host an evening with activists General Jeff (Skid Row) and Fred Dewey (public space), who will discuss the growing campaign to establish a Skid Row Neighborhood Council.
Fred Dewey co-founded the Neighborhood Councils Movement in 1993, which enshrined these councils into the 1999 revised Los Angeles City Charter. General Jeff is currently spearheading the campaign for the creation of a Skid Row Neighborhood Council.
Fred Dewey and General Jeff will explore the vision for a people-powered politics that originally motivated the Neighborhood Council Movement and how this idea underpins the current push to create a Skid Row Neighborhood Council.
Presently, Skid Row has minority representation within the Downtown Neighborhood Council. As residents of a neighborhood with unique concerns, Skid Row community members are advocating for a separate council, so that those directly affected will have a voice in addressing a diverse range of quality of life issues here, such as support for Skid Row’s flourishing recovery community and the neighborhood’s concern with increasing suitable housing stock for the homeless right within the community.
Controversies such as the recent push against the creation of desperately needed low-income housing in the Cecil Hotel have highlighted a growing feeling in the neighborhood that moneyed interests are being allowed to block construction of new housing for homeless people anywhere in Skid Row.
About the participants:
General Jeff is a key figure in the civic life of Skid Row. In 2007, he founded ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS as a vehicle for his Skid Row Community Activism. He was a driving force behind the grassroots movement, which resulted in the city’s $100,000+ investment in renewing Gladys Park. He has also lobbied successfully for improved street lighting and to mobilize residents to clean the streets. He is a former three-term member of DLANC (Downtown Neighborhood Council, 2008-14). Currently, General Jeff is Chair of the "Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee" (2014-present). Since 2013, he’s been an Advisory Committee Member for Skid Row residents, of the State of California Office of Health Equity. He is the Co-Chair of the Skid Row Community Advisory Board for the Department of Mental Health (2012-present) and Chair of the "Skid Row Public Space Task Force" (2012-present).
Fred Dewey is a writer, teacher, publisher, and public space activist based in Los Angeles and now Berlin. He helped secure neighborhood councils in the 1999 Los Angeles City Charter, co-founding the Neighborhood Councils Movement in 1993. His recent book is The School of Public Life (errant bodies), exploring his work on behalf of councils in LA, the enduring attack on public space, and the nature of people power. In Los Angeles, Dewey directed Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, in Venice, CA from 1996 to 2010. Since 2011, he has led a free, weekly public working group on Hannah Arendt in Berlin, with sessions in Oslo, Norway, London, and a graduate seminar at Berlin's Frei Universitet. His journalism has appeared in the New Statesman, LA Times, Metropolis, LA Forum for Architecture & Urban Design, Coagula, and the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, among others.
More rent parties and free events planned:
April 11-June 28: EXHIBITION Blue Book/Silver Book: making transparent the role urban design plays in determining the fate of communities.
Our next rent party, on June 6, will feature UC-Riverside professor Michael Alexander, author of Jazz Age Jews. Alexander's talk, The Jazz Age, Red Lights, and the Birth of American Entertainment, will focus on the emergence of film, music, and the modern entertainment complex.
'Ron Allen FRIED POETRY Prize' - Calling All Skid Row poets to submit poems at the poetry readings on
Friday May 8 and Friday May 15 from 6:30 - 8:00 PM. Winning poems will be read at the POETRY PRIZE PARTY on Friday, May 22, 6:30 - 8:30 PM. ~ All readings are open to all and free.
Thursday, May 14, 7PM: 'Global Gentrification? Hipster Los Angeles in Johannesburg' a presentation by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the International Institute at UCLA.
Saturday, May 23, 7PM: Rob Ochshorn talks about interacting with digital archives in the physical world and his process designing the Blue Book / Silver Book exhibition.
Stay tuned for dates of screenings and conversations:
'The Exiles' - movie about the Native American community on Bunker Hill.
'On the Bowery' - the classic film
'City Council: Who Rules?' - a film presentation for a high school Urban Investigation class by Center for Urban Pedagogy about City Council, NY.