Skid Row History Museum & Archive

Skid Row, Los Angeles, California, USA

The Skid Row History Museum & Archive is an exhibition, performance, and archive space in downtown Los Angeles's Skid Row neighborhood, created and operated by the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD); opened in 2015, it documents more than four decades of the neighborhood's activist, artistic, and recovery culture.

Overview

The Skid Row History Museum & Archive is a museum, archive, exhibition, and performance space on the mezzanine level of a building in Los Angeles's Skid Row neighborhood. It is a project of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a nonprofit arts organization founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede as the first ongoing arts initiative on Skid Row and the first performance ensemble in the country composed mainly of homeless and formerly homeless people. The museum serves as a way to examine how neighborhood displacement operates amid deep income inequality, drawing on Skid Row's own activist history and highlighting community strategies that have helped preserve the neighborhood through successive threats of gentrification. It is open to the public Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 2–5 p.m., and by appointment.

Archive and programs

The museum's mezzanine holds an extensive archive of Skid Row history — planning documents, articles, videos, oral histories, audio recordings, and interview transcripts drawn from more than four decades of LAPD performances, projects, and exhibitions — available for casual and scholarly research. Its digital centerpiece, the Walk The Talk archive, was designed by media artist Rob Ochshorn. Regular public programming at the space includes twice-weekly theater workshops, a Los Angeles Tenants Union–Downtown Local chapter meeting, a biweekly Self-Empowerment Circle, a monthly Skid Row Arts Alliance community meeting, a "Film Lover to Filmmaker" class, free movie nights on the first and third Friday of each month, a sock-puppet-making workshop, and an open mic. The museum also produces the Ron Allen Fried Poetry Prize, an annual honor named for Skid Row poet Ron Allen and produced with Dramastage-Qumran, and a recurring "rent party" salon series that pairs scholarly talks with live jazz, modeled on the rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance.

Exhibitions

The museum opened to the public on April 11, 2015, at 440 S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles with its inaugural exhibition, "Blue Book / Silver Book," on view through June 27, 2015, which displayed planning documents from a 1976 community campaign that had defeated a proposed urban-renewal plan for Skid Row. The museum is now located at 250 S. Broadway. Its exhibitions have continued to focus on grassroots strategies that preserved the neighborhood from successive threats of gentrification and displacement, for study and possible current adaptation. The current exhibition, "Hotels in Crisis (Again)," developed with Rosten Woo in a "learning in public" format, runs from November 2025 through November 2026 and addresses the condition of Skid Row's single-room-occupancy hotels.

History

In 1976, community advocates from the Catholic Worker, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and the Community Design Center, together with Skid Row residents, defeated a proposed urban-renewal plan that would have displaced the neighborhood's residents, and put forward an alternative plan to preserve and renovate the area's single-room-occupancy hotels. In 1985, director-performer-activist John Malpede, who had moved to Los Angeles to work as an outreach paralegal at the Inner City Law Center, founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department after beginning theater workshops with Skid Row's homeless population. On April 11, 2015, LAPD opened the Skid Row History Museum and Archive at 440 S. Broadway; the museum and its archive are now located at 250 S. Broadway.

Funding and governance

The Skid Row History Museum & Archive is a program of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, which has held 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS since February 1993 (EIN 95-4174562). In the fiscal year ending September 2025, LAPD reported revenue of $357,727 and expenses of $643,885, with net assets of $236,432, according to the organization's IRS Form 990; in recent fiscal years, roughly four-fifths or more of LAPD's revenue has come from contributions. The organization's governing board is led by President Catherine Gudis, with Aram Moshayedi as Vice President, Zelenne Cardenas as Treasurer, and Julia Carnahan as Secretary. The museum's exhibition programming has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; its 2015 opening exhibition was supported by the California Arts Council's Creative California Communities Program, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Leadership

John Malpede, Founding Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, has led LAPD and the Skid Row History Museum & Archive since founding the organization in 1985; LAPD's IRS Form 990 for fiscal year 2025 reported executive compensation of $69,464 paid to Malpede. Henriëtte Brouwers has served as LAPD's Associate Director and Producer since 2000, directing, performing in, and producing many of the organization's projects, including work presented at the museum.