Los Angeles Poverty Department

06/15/2026

LAPD theater workshops are postponed until July 9, 2026.

06/03/2026

Friday, June 5, 2026, 7pm
Screening BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

Directed by Benh Zeitlin Produced by Josh Penn
Runtime: 1hr 32min

Q&A with producer Josh Penn & writer Lucy Alibar!

Faced with both her hot-tempered father’s fading health and melting icecaps that flood her ramshackle bayou community and unleash ancient aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy must learn the ways of courage and love.

06/03/2026

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DY7f8P-NkYr/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

05/27/2026

https://youtu.be/BIfrSlsagd0?si=F5BDqQ0HyRn5ep2y

"In Focus" visits a nonprofit called the Los Angeles Poverty Depart...

05/27/2026

Last Saturday, we celebrated the Skid Row community in the eighth biannual Walk the Talk parade!

We were particularly grateful to carry these beautiful portraits by artist Van Hanos, and we wanted to share them here. In the order in which they were honored along the parade route: Iron Donato, Stephanie Bell, Al Ballesteros, Pastor Blue, Amelia Rayno, Tom Grode, Sean Gregory, Soma Snakeoil, and Anthony Ruffin.

05/04/2026

We have some big events coming up at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive this month, including a Movie Night featuring local filmmakers, a newly completed exhibition on residential hotels, and of course the WALK THE TALK parade! Check out all these and more in this month's calendar.

04/28/2026

We're screening the BEAVER TRILOGY for our next movie night!

Beaver Trilogy is a series of three pieces about the same subject, a young man from the small town of Beaver, Utah who is obsessed with Olivia Newton John. The first piece, "The Beaver Kid," is a documentary about Dick Griffiths (Groovin' Gary) and his Oliva fascination. The second piece, "Beaver Kid 2," is a drama based on the documentary with Sean Penn playing the part of Dick Griffiths. The third piece, "The Orkly Kid," is yet another dramatic work based on the documentary, this time with Crispin Glover in the lead.

Director: Trent Harris
Runtime: 85 minutes

04/25/2026

Coming up tomorrow (Saturday 4/25): the opening of our long-time-in-the-making exhibition, HOTELS IN CRISIS (AGAIN).

The opening celebration will take place from 5-8PM. At 5:30, Rosten Woo will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition, followed by a new, 30-minute performance by LAPD at 6:00.

HOTELS IN CRISIS (AGAIN) looks at the past, present, and future of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels in Skid Row. In the 1970s, residential hotels were being demolished throughout Los Angeles. Responding to community concerns of displacement, The City of Los Angeles and its Community Redevelopment Agency made the bold choice to form a non-profit to buy and renovate single room occupancy hotels in Skid Row. Subsequently, additional non-profits bought and renovated hotels and built new ones. Now, many hotels have again fallen into disrepair. The non-profit owner of 29 hotels, Skid Row Housing Trust, has gone bankrupt and its properties—including many newer hotels built by them—have been sold. This project excavates this history, addresses the current situation, and assesses what’s now needed to make the Skid Row Hotels into decent, truly affordable housing.

04/11/2026

Today we continue to look back at Agents & Assets, with this newly digitized footage from our archive. This clip shows media coverage of Agents & Assets New York performance, and features an interview with LA Poverty Department legend KevinMichael Key.

For the full clip, and a lot more on the Agents & Assets project, contact the archive.

02/06/2026

The Skid Row Archive is a busy place! We're always discovering new material as we refine our collections. Here, Media Archivist Henry Apodaca talks about the coolest thing he found in the archive this week: a document that deals with the performance theory behind LA Poverty Department.