TENTS AND TENANTS: After Echo Park Lake 

Los Angeles, CA – The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy is pleased to announce Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake, a groundbreaking exhibition that activates public history and reflects on practices of collective organization. Opening on February 1, 2025, the public is invited to experience how housed and unhoused tenants alike imagine, fight for, and produce in microcosm a world beyond housing capitalism.

One year after the Echo Park Lake uprising in 2021, a movement led by housed and unhoused tenants, the After Echo Park Lake Research Collective published (Dis)Placement: The Fight for Housing and Community after Echo Park Lake. The report exposed the ruse of housing, drawing attention to a condition of permanent displaceability for the City’s poor through ethnographic research, as well as analysis of homeless management data. 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, the report also 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 of 2023 the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective formed as a project joining university and movement-based scholars together to collectively archive the Echo Park Lake community’s practice of collective organization from beginning to end and beyond, documenting the politics, culture, and economy of people whose own histories are excluded from the official record. 

Like the ethos of the uprising itself, the Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake exhibition is reliant on the “visitor’s” continuation of the story through their own transformation from spectator to participant. In turn, the gallery is arranged carefully to provide the kind of accessibility characteristic of the community at Echo Park Lake, framing the visitor’s movement through the space as it might have been had one gravitated to the park themselves. The visitor is invited to spend time with the narratives of the Echo Park Lake uprising as told by those that experienced it, see themselves in the images of militant resistance, understand their own power and vulnerability in the relationships held together through the complexities of love and conflict. Visitors are invited to make things, respond, to take risks.   

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Founding Director Ananya Roy said of the exhibition: “Insert quote here.” 

William Sens, Jr., former resident of Echo Park Lake: “Insert quote here.” 

Public programs: 
Saturday, February 1, 2025 @ 5pm – Opening reception
Friday, February 21, 2025 @ 7pm – Tenants in the Streets panel discussion
Friday, March 21, 2025 @ 7pm – The Liberatory Living Room performance

Skid Row History Museum & Archive address & hours: 
250 South Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 2-5pm and by appointment: info@lapovertydept.org

Exhibition credits: 
This exhibition is organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy with support provided by the Mellon Foundation. It is on display February 1 – March 30, 2025 at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, a project of the Los Angeles Poverty Department. The After Echo Park Lake Archive can be accessed at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive. 

For more information, press only: 
Marisa Lemorande
Deputy Director
UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy
310-999-3133 / mlemorande@luskin.ucla.edu

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