The Los Angeles Poverty Department performing “State of Incarceration” (Image courtesy of Anne Maike Mertens, Redcat.org)
Color Wheel is a series in which we identify a trending color in art, and post a daily image that illustrates its popularity. In advance of the Sochi Winter Olympics, we’re going to play good patriots and explore red, white, and blue.
Patriotism probably isn’t the right header for the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), but the work definitely embodies America. Since 1985, this activist troupe of homeless or formerly-homeless performers has given a voice to Skid Row, the the LA neighborhood with one of the largest stable populations of homeless in the country, between an estimated 3,000 and 6,000. So it’s fitting that their first museum survey is happening at the Queens Museum in New York, which, as of last January, was up to 64,000.
And hopefully their initiatives will impact some of that population; they’re currently mentoring a Queens-based addiction recovery group Drogadictos Anonimos (DA), who will be performing in the LAPD’s performance “Agents & Assets”– of which the whole script was lifted directly from an investigation into the CIA’s association with crack epidemic. You only have one chance to see it, though, on February 28th at the Queens Museum.
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