Manuel Sanchez of the SVDP in Los Angeles sent notice of exhibit which “Challenges an aesthetic and practical notion of the homeless paradigm in the Skid Row” at SPARC Gallery in Venice. SPARC is pleased to announce Urban Rays, an Urban Office of Offensive Architecture (UOOA) project with an invitational presentation of works by Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Andrea Oliveira. UOOA was established in 1994 in Paris by American architect-in-training and designer Wilber Williams. Its interdisciplinary projects have utilized public spaces for events that merge art and design, while responding to the needs of those that are marginalized within today’s society. Dedicated to groundbreaking exercises in the field of architecture, UOOA questions the pedagogical notion of whom architecture and design are meant for.
Urban Rays challenges an aesthetic and practical notion of the homeless paradigm existent in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles.
While facts and figures surrounding this area are daunting, it remains a place of desperate poverty, drug use, and crime. Los Angeles’s Skid Row is home to one of the largest stable population of transient persons in the United States.
According to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, approximately 11,000-12,000 homeless individuals live in an area no more than four by five city blocks. Space is available in SRO hotels, shelters, and other temporary or transitional housing for only 9,000 to 10,000, leaving more than 1000 people unable to find shelter each night. The Court sights that there are more that 80,000 homeless individuals in Los Angeles County on any given evening. The question remains: What is an alternative means of addressing this community?
(For those of you who’ve visited the Society’s homeless shelter in downtown LA’s Skid Row, the Cardinal Manning Center, the mural you see as you enter the facility was created by the director of SPARC, Judy Baca.)Full story
Tags: Advocacy
