Artist Conversations: Raphael Escobar

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 . 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 engineers multi-event arts projects that have theatrical, installation, public art and education components. In 1985 Malpede founded and continues to direct the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people. LAPD creates performances that connect lived experience to the social  forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. Malpede has produced projects working with communities throughout the US and in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Bolivia.

Malpede has taught at UCLA, NYU’s Tisch School Of The Arts, and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance. He is a 2013 recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Fellowship. Currently, he is curating the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, an exhibition / performance space exploring gentrification issues, opening April 2015. In 2014, earlier iterations of the Museum were installed as part of the Queens Museum’s retrospective on LAPD and at the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

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)

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