The Fowler Museum and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) are partnering for a conversation with artist Raphael Escobar, whose work is featured in the exhibition Construction, Occupation. This conversation will be moderated by John Malpede, Founding Artistic Director at the Los Angeles Poverty Department and Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, associate professor and graduate vice chair at the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. 

Raphael Escobar
​​Since 2007, Raphael Escobar has worked in non-formal arts education settings of social vulnerability and political disputes, including Fundação CASA, a juvenile detention facility, and Cracolândia, an area of downtown São Paulo—with many similarities to Skid Row—characterized by a large unhoused population with high rates of drug and alcohol use. Informed by long-term community relationships, Escobar’s work in these contexts often takes the form of performance and community intervention, serving as an activating element within a broader research process. His inquiry is guided by an interest in stigma and class relations; and calls into question a moral system that renders precarious those who live on the streets.

John Malpede
John Malpede directs, performs and produces multi-disciplinary artworks and events with theatrical, installation, public art, and education components. Malpede founded Los Angeles Poverty Department in Skid Row in 1985 and continues as its Artistic Director. LAPD creates performances, exhibitions and other interventions that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD’s “Agents & Assets” (2000-2014) addressed the impact of the war on drugs on individuals and communities.  “State of Incarceration” (2011-14), addressed mass incarceration. “Utopia/dystopia,” “The Back 9” and “I Fly” (2018) and addressed gentrification and displacement.  In 2015, LAPD founded the Skid Row History Museum & Archive in downtown Los Angeles.  The Museum, LAPD’s Festival for All Skid Row Artists and our Walk the Talk performance/ parade assert the vibrant existence of Skid Row and its residents and act as a bulwark against displacement. In 2009 LAPD convened the neighborhood and Malpede co-authored, with Maria Rosario Jackson the paper “Making the Case for Skid Row Culture”. Malpede rants: Confuse the categories. He has received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, New York’s Dance Theater Workshop Bessie Creation Award, and has been a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies.  Malpede’s “RFK in EKY” (2004) was produced by Appalshop.

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is associate professor and graduate vice chair at the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. His research sits between the arts and social sciences, cultural theory and aesthetic practice. Working with activists, curators, and artists in Brazil, Ungprateeb Flynn investigates the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts and theorizes about the production of knowledge, notions of utopia, and social and aesthetic dimensions of form. Through a collaborative methodological approach, he inquires into how human beings express themselves artistically, and in doing so, seek to transform the world.

This program is in partnership with the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)

Image courtesy of Raphael Escobar