Exhibit
Los Angeles Poverty Department
**February 1 – March 30, 2025
**Skid Row History Museum & Archive
Open Thu, Fri, Sat, 2-5pm
EXHIBITION ‘Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake’ by UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, about how poor people make the city their home, even in the face of state violence.
Public programs:
EXHIBITION
Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake, a public exhibition by The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, about how poor people make the city their home, even in the face of state violence. Abandoned by the city during a global pandemic, unhoused organizers created an encampment at Echo Park Lake that soon became an uprising. The exhibition and associated public programs activate an archive of organizing histories that is intended to be the practice of a collective future.
The exhibition opens amidst a new round of devastation, displacement, and dispossession in Los Angeles. We had always intended for it to illuminate the unending crisis that is racial capitalism, and now more than ever we hope that it will provide an occasion to strengthen community in the face of loss. What does it mean to understand the City of Angels from the vantage point of its most precarious residents, those constantly facing banishment and expulsion?
The militarized eviction of the Echo Park Lake encampment in March 2021 was a pivotal moment in Los Angeles, one that demonstrated the police power of the state against unhoused communities. In its wake, we formed the After Echo Park Lake Research Collective which brought together university, movement, and encampment scholars. Our report, (Dis)Placement: The Fight for Housing and Community after Echo Park Lake, published a year after the eviction, repudiated the claims of power holders in the city that those displaced from the park had been housed. Instead, we drew attention to a condition of permanent displaceability for the poor. A key finding was that at a time of expanded housing resources underwritten by federal and state emergency relief funds, there was a perverse investment of public funds in the criminalization of poverty and in the carceral containment of the unhoused.
In sharp contrast to such carcerality, our research highlighted the infrastructures of community, envisioned by housed and unhoused organizers, including that which was built and sustained at Echo Park Lake. In a mission to preserve this important chapter in social movement history, the work of the After Echo Park Lake Research Collective continued, and in Summer 2023 the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective formed in order to archive the histories of organizing at Echo Park Lake. This exhibition, and associated public programs, are an offering from the ongoing work of the collective.
As was the case with the encampment, the Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake exhibition aims to transform you from spectator into participant. In visiting the gallery, you are invited to spend time with narratives of the Echo Park Lake uprising as told by those who led and experienced it and who built complex relationships of love and conflict, often in public view. We hope that the exhibition will move you to reflect and respond, in relation to the city’s many histories, as well as its present moment of disaster.
Exhibition credits: This exhibition is organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy with support provided by the Mellon Foundation.
UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy’s Mission: The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working in alliance with social movements and communities on the frontlines of struggle, the Institute seeks to abolish structures of inequality.
The After Echo Park Lake Archive can be accessed at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, 250 S. Broadway, Los Angeles CA 90012, a project of Los Angeles Poverty Department.
