Los Angeles Poverty Department

Programming during the fiscal year continued to creatively serve our low-income Skid Row community. In October we held our 13th annual 2-day Festival for All Skid Row Artists in Gladys Park Skid Row. In January we published and distributed free to community members 2,000 tabloid newspapers featuring 150 artists who participated in October's Festival. In Los Angeles Poverty Department's Skid Row theater workshops 60 workshops over 8 months Skid Row community members created Resilience,a performance focused on individuals' innate abilities for self-realization and fulfillment to heal themselves. Resilience taps into the innate health in everyone by exploring activities that we like to do. Resilience was performed 6 times twice at our space at an arts festival a conference of non-profit housing developers and at The Midnight Mission and the Downtown Women's Center with total attendance of 1,200. The Resilience performances connected thematically to our gallery exhibition January through August Cosmology & Community designed with our community curator Charles Porter and muralist Joshua Grace. This was one of 4 exhibitions we created during FY-22-3. The others included Blue Book Green Paper and How to House 7,000 people in Skid Row both exhibitions ran through December 2022. In mid-September opened our next exhibition Enough is never enough: Hard Truths and the People that Live Them documenting people living on the streets of Skid Row and in the San Fernando Valley by photographer David Blumenkranz and his students. Throughout the year we continued our bi-weekly film series and initiated a monthly open mic evening. We also hosted events organized by individual Skid Row artists and Skid Row community groups including a Juneteenth celebration organized by community DJ Sir Oliver. During spring and summer we continued our research and began designing our exhibitions that will be realized in the current FY--- that focuses on medical personnel who staffed the LA County Quarantine Sites for homeless people with Covid for an upcoming exhibition. Throughout FY 22-23 working with other Skid Row arts organizations we created and distributed quarterly Art Zine that included arts activities and highlighted artists and arts groups in Skid Row. Printing of 2,500 copies per-issue of the 32-page magazine was provided by the City of Los Angeles. Throughout FY22-23 our archivists worked with 10 volunteers to continue to put our archival holdings in Central Management System while also acquiring new materials generated through our activities and donated from other Skid Row community members and groups.