TENTS AND TENANTS: After Echo Park Lake Exhibition Catalog

The Echo Park Lake encampment was an uprising. A settlement of tents in an iconic public park in the gentrified heart of Los Angeles, it offered a poor people’s radical solution to the housing crisis. From challenging sweeps to constructing an infrastructure of life, the Echo Park Lake encampment built an alternative world. In doing so, it became a threat to the policed-propertied order of Los Angeles, eventually facing eviction through a police invasion. Even so, the dreams and practices of the Echo Park Lake encampment could not be easily squashed, and they live on in the struggles of housed and unhoused tenants today. TENTS AND TENANTS charts the eras of organizing that unfolded at Echo Park Lake, uncovering not only the machinations of state power, but also how poor people made the city their home. A public exhibition organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, curated by the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective, and displayed at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, a project of Los Angeles Poverty Department, it is intended to be the practice of a collective future.

Exhibition Public Programs:

On The Road:

  • Selections from the TENTS AND TENANTS exhibition are currently on view in the Demand the Impossible Advocacy Space at the National Public Housing Museum.

Download >> TENTS AND TENANTS: After Echo Park Lake Exhibition Catalog (Published January 22, 2025)