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Evaluating art for social change: the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department in relationship to Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil; Evaluating art for social cha...

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Evaluating Art for Social Change:

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department

in relationship to Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Art (CURATORIAL STUDIES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)
Conferred by the
USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Alexandra Smale
i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my mentors, friends and family for their support while writing this thesis. I
would especially like to thank my thesis advisor Assistant Professor of Critical Studies Andy
Campbell for his endless advice and patience. Andy brought a sense of joy and humor to even
the most challenging aspects of writing. I would like to thank Professor and Interim Vice Dean
of the Critical Studies Karen Moss who has provided valuable feedback and guidance throughout
the development of both my final practicum project and this thesis on the same topic. I would
also like to thank Associate Professor of Urban Planning Annette Kim whose coursework,
feedback as my third thesis reader, and Race, Arts and Placemaking (RAP) seminar series has
been instrumental in helping me study the intersection of urban planning and community-based
art.

This work could not have happened without my friends, both near and far, who have been
incredibly understanding and supportive over the past two years. In particular, I would like to
thank Kat Sayarath who has spent endless hours studying at coffee shops and discussing my
thesis with me. I would also like to thank Rachel Peterson and Mary Goss both of whom have
offered so many words of support over the phone and in person when visiting from Northern
California.

Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Joanne Sizemore, and sister, Ashley Sizemore, who
have been the most supportive and understanding over the past two years. You have helped me
bring perspective to the work I have done. Thank you for always encouraging and believing in
me.
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………i
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..………1
Chapter 1: Arte Útil ……...……………………………………………………………………….7
1.1: Usefulness and Influence of the Arts………………………………………...……...10
1.2: Temporality and Sustainability……………………………………………………...13
1.3: Initiators and Users……………………………….……………….………………...14
1.4: Aesthetics as a System of Transformation……………...…………………………...15
1.5: Arte Útil Criteria..…………………………...……………….……………………...16
Chapter 2: The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project……….………………….…………………..….17
2.1: History and Methodology…………………………………..……………………….18
2.2: AEMP in Relation to Arte Útil……………….…………………………….……….27
Chapter 3: The Los Angeles Poverty Department……….…………………………………...….31
3.1: History………………………………………………………………………………32
3.2: Methodology…………………………………………………..…………………….35
3.3: What Fuels Development? ………………………………………………………….39
3.4: LAPD in Relation to Arte Útil……..…………….………………………………….44
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….47
Bibliography………………………………….………………………………………………….52

1

INTRODUCTION

During the Summer of 2016 I organized a panel discussion as part of Open Engagement,
an artist-led conference about socially engaged art.
1
At the end of the three-day conference, panel
organizers and speakers were invited to attend a final day of workshops at Yerba Buena Center
for the Arts about the future of socially engaged art. After listening to speakers, for our last
activity that day we formed break-out groups and discussed specific prompts. My group’s
prompt asked if socially engaged artists have a responsibility to directly influence the issue to
which their art responds. I remember sitting on the grass in Yerba Buena Gardens outside of the
museum as our group struggled to answer the question. Since that summer my answer to this
question has evolved, but at the time I was the only person on our group of seven to say I
believed artists producing socially engaged work should strive to make a demonstrable social or
political impact. One of the members of our discussion group said they saw a difference from art
production and activism. Another woman talked about the time constraints of trying to make a
living as a working artist and new mother, and explained that while her work does not shift
public policy, it creates a positive impact by spurring critical discussion.
Our group’s discussion questions touched on the difference between socially engaged art
that responds or reflects on issues of socio-political inequality, and artwork made with the
intention to change socio-political conditions. While I did not know it at that time, this

1
Socially engaged art, also know as socially engaged practice or social practice, is artwork centered around human
interaction and social discourse. These works of art are often participatory. In social practice the act of social
engagement and critical discourse is not a product of a work of art but is part of the artwork itself. See: Claire
Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso Books),
2012; Grant Kestler, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley; London; Los
Angeles: University of California Press), 2004; Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle:
Bay Press), 1995.
2
distinction has been the subject of extensive theoretical writing about socially engaged art. Italian
artist Pino Poggi wrote a manifesto about what he termed “useful art” in 1965.
2
Four years later,
in 1969, Argentine artist Eduardo Costa wrote a similar manifesto about useful art and created
works of useful art in New York City designed to improve the lives of local residents.
3
More
recently, in 2003, Cuban social practice artist Tania Bruguera expanded upon these earlier
attempts to make useful art, by suggesting Arte Útil as a framework with specifically defined
criteria to develop and evaluate socially engaged artwork, with the intention to create measurable
and demonstrable impacts.
In this thesis I consider the storytelling practices of two social practice arts groups, the
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), and
evaluate their work within Bruguera’s framework of Arte Útil. AEMP and LAPD both have
dialogical arts practices where works of art are collaboratively developed through critical
dialogue. I will not focus on Bruguera’s work in relation to AEMP and LAPD, but instead I draw
from the theoretical framework that Bruguera developed in conjunction with the Asociación de
Arte Util, an organization she helped create. In the nascent field of social practice art few
theoretical frameworks have been developed to evaluate these types of projects. To date there is
no literature about Arte Útil that applies and critiques this framework as a methodology for
understanding a specific type of social practice artwork. I chose to critique Arte Útil because it
attempts to identify how and why specific artwork creates lasting demonstrable change in
society. As a framework Arte Útil has some significant limitations that include criteria that are
overly general and not easily applicable to the wide range of social practice projects that create

2
John Byrne, “Social Autonomy and the Use Value of Art,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 42, no.
1 (2016): 60-69.
3
Ibid.
3
measurable impacts. Additionally, the framework does not consider the symbolic and poetic
significance of art. However, applying and critiquing this framework raises important questions
about the how the impacts of social practice art can be evaluated. Questioning how and why
social practice art is valued is essential to further defining this quickly growing field.
This thesis critiques Arte Útil by carefully evaluating the application of this framework.
Both the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department advocate for
housing justice through practices that use storytelling to reframe dominant narratives about
homelessness and housing inequality. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is currently included
in the Asociación de Arte Util’s archive of Arte Útil projects, while the Los Angeles Poverty
Department is not. However, both groups use their work to create specific impacts like
increasing referrals to tenant’s rights legal clinics and organizing community opposition to
proposed real estate developments.
I first learned about the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), or the “Mapping
Project” as many of its members refer to it, when I was living in Oakland where the group
regularly met. I became interested in the project after visiting AEMP’s website which includes
numerous maps documenting displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area, oral history
interviews with displaced community members, as well as other forms of visual storytelling
including murals, community power maps, and exhibitions. The Mapping Project started in 2012
by anthropologist Erin McElroy and had already gained national recognition when I first learned
of the group in 2014. The project emerged at a time when gentrification and accompanying
displacement seemed pervasive across the Bay Area. Like most residents in the Bay Area, the I
was personally concerned about the quickly rising cost of living when I lived in Oakland from
2013 to 2016. Everywhere I went—on BART cars, coffee shops and even walking down the
4
street—I heard talk about rising rents, gentrification, and the material impacts of the tech
industry.
4
At that time, many of my friends and activists I knew working in Oakland felt that the
economy, housing market, and political process were not being effectively impacted by local
advocacy work.
The extensive data visualizations the Mapping Project has created have been widely used
by political and anti-displacement advocacy organizations including the Eviction Defense
Collaborative, Tenants Together, Causa Justa/Just Cause, and more.
5
The Mapping Project has
over fifty maps shared publicly via their website, each documenting changes happening
throughout the Bay Area, including the rise of evictions, the decline in community art spaces,
and an increase in police surveillance in gentrifying areas, just to name a few. Recently, the
Mapping Project started new chapters in Los Angeles and New York City. While I will focus on
the Mapping Project’s work in the San Francisco Bay Area in this thesis, new project chapters
are beginning to add additional documentation of dispossession in New York and Los Angeles to
the Mapping Project’s website. In addition to visualizing the unseen forces of gentrification and
displacement, I believe the Mapping Project has garnered the attention and support it has because
the group intentionally created a platform to share and listen to community narratives, in contrast
to a sedimented and laissez-faire civic system. The project is collectively and volunteer run, and
anyone interested can join as a member of the collective. While some members join with prior

4
Laura Kusisto, "Apple Paychecks--One Reason for High Home Prices; Employees at Apple Live in Pricier Homes
than Others in Bay Area, and Values Are Rising Faster," https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-payone-reason-for-
high-home-prices-1445801810, (October 25, 2015).
5
Eviction Defense Collaborative, Annual Report 2016 (2016),
http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/edc2016.html; Tenants Together and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project,
The Spectulator Loophole: Ellis Act Eviction in San Francisco,
http://antievictionmappingproject.net/speculatorloophole.html, (2014); Causa Justa / Just Cause, “San Francisco’s
Housing Crisis in Numbers,” https://cjjc.org/mediapress/san-francisco-s-housing-crisis-in-numbers/, (2014).
5
mapping or oral history interviewing experience, many come with only an interest in learning
and build these skills through working with one another.
When I moved from to Oakland to Los Angeles to begin my graduate studies at the
University of Southern California I believed I would write my Master thesis on the relationship
between art and displacement. However, in the process of researching the connection between
gentrification and certain artistic practices, I learned about and was inspired by arts groups
supporting communities facing displacement. The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is
one of these groups. Founded in 1985 by director, performer, and activist John Maplede, and
LAPD is the first performance group in the U.S. comprised predominantly of homeless
individuals. LAPD began working in Skid Row in Los Angeles at a time when support services
for homeless individuals in Los Angeles focused almost exclusively on food and shelter. Today,
the Los Angeles Poverty Department writes and performs narratives based on the experiences of
its members living in Skid Row. Over their thirty years working in Skid Row the group has
produced plays and interactive performances, developed a theater company that travels
internationally, and has opened the Skid Row Museum and Archive to celebrate the community’s
artistic and cultural history.
6

LAPD’s experimental performances often break the rules of traditional theater
performance and incorporate a fair amount of improvisation. Their performance of What Fuels
Development? (2015 - present) illustrates the group’s varied approaches to storytelling. What
Fuels Development? is inspired by the true story of Skid Row residents who successfully
blocked the development of a restaurant and bar on the ground floor of a building managed by

6
Los Angeles Poverty Department, “LAPD History,” https://www.lapovertydept.org/lapd-history/.
6
the Skid Row Housing Trust. The building is home to formerly homeless residents, many of
whom were, and still are, recovering from alcoholism.
I begin this thesis in Chapter One with an introduction to the history and influence of Arte
Útil and by analyzing the specific criteria that are used to define the term. The following
chapters will further employ these criteria by using them as a framework for a deeper
understanding of the work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty
Department. Some of the issues I intend to discuss include the relationship between art and
advocacy, and how usefulness is defined by of Arte Útil. In the final Chapter Four, I will draw
conclusions concerning Arte Útil’s suggestion that interdisciplinary arts projects intended to
create lasting socio-political change should be evaluated using different set of standards than
other socially engaged arts practices and the implications this may have for future research.

7

CHAPTER 1:
ARTE ÚTIL

During a 2014 interview Tania Bruguera explained that she came up with the term Arte
Útil in an effort to describe art that offered practical usable solutions to pressing social issues.
7

Although she started to use the term in 2003, according to Bruguera, it was not until 2011 that
she learned of and read Argentine artist Eduardo Costa’s Manifesto de Arte Útil (1969) and was
later still introduced to Italian artist Pino Poggi whose Arte Útil manifestos predated Costa’s.
8

Eduardo Costa started his series Useful Art Works in New York City in 1969 in an effort to
“attack the myth of the the lack of utility in the arts, while being in themselves a modest
contribution to the improvement of city living conditions.”
9
In the interview, Bruguera explains
that she was surprised to learn that the idea of Arte Útil had been previously defined and
described using the same name. Aside from the startlingly similar names used to describe the
field, the shared motives behind each artists’ efforts to conceive of and describe useful art
reflects a common desire to move beyond socially engaged artwork that identifies inequality or
imagines a fairer future, towards one that plays a role in shaping a more equitable reality.
Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil is influenced by curator and theorist Stephen Wright
whose research focuses on the use value of art or “usership,” a term he created. Wright has
written about and advocated for art that creates an action or impact outside of the arts industry.

7
Paul O'Neill, "Tania Bruguera." Bomb, no. 128 (2014): 124-33.
8
Ibid.
9
Tania Bruguera, “Introduction on Useful Art,” http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-
Introduction+on+Useful+Art.htm.
8
One of his best known papers, “Towards a Lexicon of Usership,” was published in conjunction
with the opening of Tania Bruguera’s Museum of Arte Útil exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in
2013.
10
In “Towards a Lexicon of Usership,” Wright defines over forty terms he identifies as
central to understanding usership in the arts, such as authorship, hacking, and “Use it Together.”
He defines usership as “a category of engagement,” that allows a user to “[repurpose] available
ways and means without seeking to possess them… as a mode of leverage, a fulcrum, a shifter,
and as such, a game-changer.”
11
Wright’s interpretation of usership as an outcomes-based
activity has influenced Bruguera’c concept of useful art which is focused on demonstrable
outcomes.
Costa, Poggi and Wright’s work have all been incorporated into Asociación de Arte
Útil’s (AAU) online platform, a site that catalogues international examples of Arte Útil artworks
and projects. The platform currently has over 200 case studies, provides resources for
researchers, students, and artists, and is designed as an open source space for exchange of
ideas.
12
AAU is a membership organization working to promote Arte Útil. While Bruguera’s
work has played a crucial role in the development of AAU, this essay will focus on the applying
the criteria for Arte Útil defined and promoted by AAU. The development of AAU is part of
Bruguera’s art practice. However, Bruguera intended for the eight qualities of Arte Útil and the
corresponding tools and resources on AAU’s website to be used by artists, students and
researches as theoretical and practical guideposts for understanding this particular type of art.

10
Stephen Wright, “Towards a Lexicon of Usership,” http://museumarteutil.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/12/Toward-a-lexicon-of-usership.pdf; Omer Krieger, “Introduction: Stephen Wright’s
Theory,” Maarav, no. 18 (2016), http://maarav.org.il/english/2016/04/26/introduction-stephen-wrights-theory-omer-
krieger/.
11
Ibid. Stephen Wright’s analysis draws on Marxist terminology and is influence by Immanuel Kant’s theory of
aesthetics. While the theoretical influences on Wright’s work are not the focus of thesis they are interesting to note
and could be a potential area of future study.
12
Asociación de Arte Útil,“About / This Platform,” http://www.arte-util.org/about/links/.
9
Instead of contextualizing AAU within Bruguera’s larger body of work, this essay uses the tools
and criteria shared through AAU’s online platform, as the frameworks Bruguera intended them
to be, to better understand the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty
Department.
Today, the AAU is co-directed by Tania Bruguera and Alistair Hudson, and features
content from thirty-four researchers and correspondents. AAU is sponsored by three institutional
partners: the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), the Van Abbemuseum in
Eindhoven, and the Whitworh Art gallery in Manchester.
13
AAU has built upon Bruguera’s
concept of Arte Útil which is part of a larger trend of artist and art historian created terminology
specific to social practice art. Social practice is a field of art that involves collaboration or social
interaction and is often politically oriented. The growing field of social practice includes many
different approaches to community and political engagement.
Other terminology created by artists and art historians has helped to further define sub-
genres of social practice art. For example, artist Suzanne Lacy has introduced her term “new
genre public art,” to describe activist oriented art that exists outside of institutional content and is
intended to directly engage the public.
14
Additionally, terminology has been introduced to
describe political and activist art addressing specific subject matter, such as environmental art
and border art.
15
New terminology used to describe artistic sub-genres can provide helpful
frameworks for further study, can encourage artistic production, and may also be helpful in
marketing specific types of art. However, the introduction and use of new terminologies or

13
Asociación de Arte Útil, “About / Info,” http://www.arte-util.org/about/association/.
14
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press), 1995.
15
Tate, “Environmental Art,” http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/e/environmental-art; Guisela Latorre, "Border
Art," The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, (Oxford University Press, 2005).
10
frameworks should be critically considered because poorly defined or repetitive terminology can
cause confusion.
In the context of this thesis, Arte Útil refers to the understanding of this field as defined
by AAU. In English Arte Útil translates to “useful art.” However, in Spanish the phrasing of the
term also suggests art’s use as a tool.
16
AAU defines Arte Útil as art that:
1. Propose new uses for art within society
2. Challenges the field within which it operates (civic, legislative, pedagogical, scientific,
economic, etc.)
3. Is “timing specific,” responding to current urgencies
4. Is implemented and function in real situations
5. Replaces authors with initiators and spectators with users
6. Has practical, beneficial outcomes for its users
7. Pursues sustainability whilst adapting to changing conditions
8. Re-establishes aesthetics as a system of transformation

This chapter will look at each of the above attributes of Arte Útil and their significance. AAU
lists these qualities as they are written above: each numbered in a list and provided without a
discussion of how these attributes relate to one another. However, several of these qualities are
closely related making it difficult to discuss one apart from the other. The section below
discusses these criteria and their significance to Arte Útil as a field with a focus on the criteria as
they related to art’s political use in society, temporality and sustainability, the active roles of
initiators and users play in Arte Útil, and finally re-establishing aesthetic as a system of
transformation.

Usefulness and Influence of the Arts
Criteria numbers one, two, four and six are concerned with usefulness and what it means
for artwork to be labeled or considered useful. The first criteria, “to propose new uses for art in

16
Asociación de Arte Útil, “About /Arte Útil,” http://www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/.
11
society,” is also one of the most problematic, because it is so generalized. All of the AAU’s
criterion are offered on the organization’s online portal without much discussion or context.
While the platform offers other tools—including construction plans for building an exhibition of
AAU’s archival materials, case studies, and Steven Wright’s essay about usership terminology—
little explanation surrounds AAU’s central criteria. The idea of presenting new uses for art in
society is problematic because it calls into question the meanings of “usefulness” in this context.
Through interviews and articles Bruguera has helped to clarify “usefulness” as she has conceived
and often spoken of art as a tool.
17
Criteria number six provides additional insight into the
meaning of “usefulness” in this context, specifying that Arte Útil must have beneficial outcomes
for its users.
The rhetoric used in these two criteria are problematic when considered independent from
the other six qualities. By describing Arte Útil’s defining characteristics as “useful” and
“beneficial” the framework provided on AAU’s website unintentionally implies that art forms
falling outside of this genre are not useful or beneficial. Any art that a viewer engages with is
beneficial and useful in that there may be an emotional, pedagogical, or relational component for
the viewer. Elsewhere on AAU’s website Arte Útil’s usefulness is described as the development
of “methods and social formations to deal with issues that were once the domain of the state.”
18

Based on Bruguera’s interview and literature about Arte Útil found elsewhere on AAU’s website
I believe AAU defines the usefulness and beneficial impacts of Arte Útil as art that both
advocates for positive social, political, and economic change and has measurable impacts.
The second and fourth criteria also indicate that AAU understands usefulness as positive
quantifiable socio-political change. These criteria specify that Arte Útil must challenge the

17
Paul O'Neill, "Tania Bruguera," Bomb, no. 128 (2014): 124-33.
18
Asociación de Arte Útil, “About /Arte Útil,” http://www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/.
12
field(s) it operates within and must be implemented and functional in real situations. These
descriptors help define Arte Útil in relation to social practice art. Carolina A. Miranda writing for
Art News describes social practice as a “a stream of participatory art that tends to display a strong
sociological and political bent, often in an effort to draw attention to social ills and conditions,”
adding that “sometimes, these projects are meant to incite empowerment or change in a
community.”
19
Arte Útil is part of the larger field of social practice art but specifically focuses on
artwork intended to create change in communities. While social practice usually offers
commentary on pressing social or political issue, it has not historically always presented a
solution that is then enacted. Arte Útil requires that the solutions or mechanisms for social
change developed by artists be enacted.
The active role Arte Útil projects play in society positions Arte Útil as inherently political
and activist in nature. To be considered Arte Útil an artwork must actively critique a field. By
operating in real situations the critique interacts with the field or system the work seeks to
reform. For example, Project Row House, a social practice and Arte Útil project in Houston, TX
started by artists Rick Lowe, James Bettison, Bert Long, Jesse Lott, Floyd Newsum, Bert
Samples, and George Smith proposes a practical solution to issues surrounding affordable
housing development. Prior to initiating Project Row House, Rick Lowe made artwork
concerned with social and economic issues facing poor communities. Lowe has famously said
that his art practice changed after a high school student told him that people living in poor
communities were aware of the issues they faced and instead said Lowe should focus on creating

19
Carolina A. Miranda, “How the Art of Social Practice is Changing the World, One Row House as a Time,”
ArtNet, April 7, 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2014/04/07/art-of-social-practice-is-changing-the-world-one-row-
house-at-a-time/.
13
a solution.
20
Lowe’s work prior to Project Row House was social practice art that responded to
issues of social inequality. However, unlike his earlier work Project Row House is social practice
art that responds to socio-political issues while also creating a usable solution. Accordingly,
Project Row Houses is recognized by AAU as Arte Útil and included in AAU’s archive. The
project creates affordable housing and continues to promote sustainable economic development
through innovative and community-based organizing mechanisms not seen in traditional urban
development projects and programs. By developing housing, managing real estate, and
intentionally spurring sustainable economic development Project Row House interacts with the
economic, capitalist, and affordable housing systems it critiques by taking a largely community
initiated and driven approach to development. Like Project Row House, Arte Útil projects are
often political in nature because instead of existing solely in the gallery or museum Arte Útil
interacts with the systems it aims to reform.

Temporality and Sustainability
Urgency and adaptability are equally essential components of Arte Útil. Criteria three and
seven specify that Arte Útil must be timing-specific and sustainable in its ability to adapt to
changing circumstances. While social practice art may be concerned with contemporary social
and political issues at the time of its enactment, requiring art to be sustainable, adaptable, and
future-oriented further differentiates Arte Útil from other forms of social practice. Social practice
art is sometimes an individual object or short-lived project or performance. However, community
and political organizing methodologies have shown that lasting socio-political change is almost
never the product of short-lived messaging or interaction with a public. Rather, political and

20
Michael Kimmelman, “In Houston, Art is Where Home Is,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Dec. 17,
2006.
14
social change emerge from ongoing community engagement, organizing and education. To
effectively engage with and transform fields outside of the arts Arte Útil has drawn from
successful methodological approaches in other fields. Arte Útil’s focus on adaptability also
indicates that as a field Arte Útil approaches advocacy through useful art as a continuing and
ongoing form of engagement. In addition to this, initiatives aimed at promoting change must also
be able to adapt to changing cultural and political landscapes, as well as unexpected setbacks.
Like Arte Útil’s focus on ongoing engagement, its emphasis on adaptability is influenced by
fields focused on promoting social and political change.

Initiators and Users
The roles of initiators and users distinguishes Arte Útil from other forms of social
practice art, reframing the field using utilitarian terminology. AAU’s intentional decision not to
use terminology associated with the arts further aligns Arte Útil with fields outside of the arts.
While the word author means to invent or create something it carries with it associations with
authority and the humanities. Author is derived from the words auctor, autour, or autor in Old
French from the mid 14
th
century which meant “father, creator, one who brings about, one who
makes or creates.” In the late 14
th
century authorship was understood as a “source of
authoritative information or opinion,” similar to contemporary understanding of the word
authority.
21
Today, authorship is often associated with intellectual property and creativity,
especially in literature. Given the etymology and contemporary associations with the word
author it is understandable that AAU prefers to refer to artists as initiators. This difference is not
merely semantic; initiator describes someone who starts a larger plan or process and is more

21
Online Etymology Dictionary, “Author,” https://www.etymonline.com/word/author.
15
closely aligned with Arte Útil’s focus on continuous engagement. Instead of reader or spectator,
AAU uses the word user to describe an active participant. Initiator and user are posited as more
active words than author and spectator. While an author creates something that might be a
stagnant object for a viewer or reader to interpret, an initiator starts a process which is ongoing,
and its outlines are determined by user engagement.
In addition to providing clarification about the roles individuals play in Arte Útil this
distinction is also symbolic. Today, the word users is most commonly associated with someone
who uses a product or tool. For example, people operating machines or using computer
applications are referred to as users. The word initiator is not used as widely as user in
contemporary English. However, initiator is related with the word initiative which is widely used
in politics and public policy. By incorporating language predominantly used by other fields Arte
Útil aligns itself with fields traditional considered more useful or practical. Additionally, using
language more common outside of the arts is another way of making Arte Útil accessible to users
unfamiliar with the arts.

Aesthetics as a System of Transformation
Similar to the criteria concerning usability, AAU’s final requirement for Arte Útil is that
it “re-establish[es] aesthetics as a system of transformation.” The way the last criteria is written
makes it challenging to understand without more context. The phasing implies that AAU
believes aesthetics used to be transformative, but are no longer. The AAU does not provide
details about when they believe aesthetics were useful in the past or when the movement away
from art that acts a system of transformation began in earnest. Without more information about
what AAU understands as transformative aesthetics, it is difficult for scholars and artists to apply
16
this criteria. At the same time, the murkiness of the description also means this criteria can be
interpreted in multiple ways. This lack of specificity may be an intentional decision made by
AAU to incorporate works that are transformative in ways AAU knows they cannot anticipate—
in other words it is a call to a future which has not yet arrived. Regardless, this final quality
emphasis that despite Arte Útil’s focus on social transformation the aesthetic qualities of an
artwork must play a key role its transformative influence.

Arte Útil Criteria
The eight qualities AAU identifies as distinguishing characteristics of Arte Útil are best
understood as loose guidelines that inform one another. Certain criteria may seem confusing or
unclear when discretely considered but when put in conjunction with other criteria, they paint a
more full picture of Arte Útil. These criteria are helpful in defining Arte Útil in contrast to the
larger field of social practice. Additionally, these qualities require that Arte Útil is a sustainable
ongoing practice that actively engages and works to transform the system(s) it critiques through
aesthetics that engage users. When applied to AEMP and LAPD’s practices these criteria are
helpful in understanding the specific ways that these groups create lasting social change.
However, applying the criteria also highlights some of the limitations and shortcomings of Arte
Útil’s framework which is at times both overly generalized and inflexible.

17

CHAPTER 2:
THE ANTI-EVICTION MAPPING PROJECT

In this chapter I will focus on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (AEMP) history,
methodology, and work in relationship to Arte Útil. It should be mentioned that the members of
the AEMP do not outright describe themselves as an arts collective. However, their work has
been regularly shared in art museum and galleries including the Betti Ono Gallery, the Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).
The Mapping Project has also received grants from funders in the arts. In 2016, the Mapping
Project’s “Oakland Community Power Map” was shown in the Betti Ono Gallery in downtown
Oakland in 2016.
22
That same year the group’s work was featured in Take This Hammer: Art +
Media Activism form the Bay Area at YBCA.
23
A year later, AEMP participated in a symposium
about usership and the arts hosted by the SFMoMA and YBCA which I discuss in more detail
below. In addition to sharing their work in arts spaces, the Mapping Project received a grant in
2017 from the arts organizations Southern Exposure.
24
Even through AEMP does not describe
itself as arts collective, by placing their work in arts settings they imply that their work can be
seen as art. In addition to the maps and oral history interviews that AEMP have shared in arts
spaces, the mapping project also creates more traditional forms of visual arts like zines and a
mural.

22
Creative Work Fund, “Anti-Eviction Mapping Project at the Betti Ono Gallery,”
http://creativeworkfund.org/news/anti-eviction-mapping-project-at-betti-ono-gallery.
23
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, “Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area,”
https://www.ybca.org/whats-on/take-this-hammer.
24
Southern Exposure, “Round 10: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project,” https://www.soex.org/alternative-
exposure/grant-recipients-projects/anti-eviction-mapping-project.
18
This thesis is not the first time AEMP’s work has been considered in relation to Arte Útil.
In September 2017 the Mapping Project participated in “Does Art Have Users?” a three-day
symposium co-organized by SFMoMA and YBCA in conjunction with Tania Bruguera: Talking
to Power / Hablándole al Poder, a survey of Brugeura’s work at YBCA. During the symposium
Mapping Project members led a walking tour of San Francisco’s Mission District called
Fractured Atlas: A Mission Neighborhood Walk. The tour included a discussion on displacement
and the social politics that have made the Mission District a trendy and desirable neighborhood
for a newer class of young and affluent San Francisco residents. The following day Carla
Wozjcuk, one of the Mapping Project members, participated in the panel discussion What
Happens at the Intersection of the Arts and Data? at the SFMoMA.
25
Since the symposium, the
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has been added to AAU’s online archive, however, the collective
and its work have not been evaluated in terms of their alignment with the Arte Útil criteria.

History and Methodology
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project was started in 2013 by Erin McElroy, a feminist
geographer who has organized with several other tenants’ rights advocacy groups including
Eviction Free San Francisco and Heart of the City Collective.
26
McElroy started the Mapping
Project in response the widespread evictions happening in conjunction with the tech industry
boom in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2010s. Prior to starting the Mapping Project
McElroy completed a Masters degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology where they studied

25
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Does Art Have Users?” https://www.sfmoma.org/event/series/does-art-
have-users/.
26
Model View Culture, “Erin McElroy,” https://modelviewculture.com/authors/erin-mcelroy.
19
the displacement of Romanians in Romania.
When McElroy returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after completing their degree,
they realized that many of their friends were facing similar issues in the Bay Area. In an
interview with the online news publication Pando, McElroy explained that after knowing almost
40 people who had been evicted in San Francisco, some through no fault evictions and others via
landlord buyouts, that they had a running joke among friends about opening a moving
company.
27
Tired of seeing friends and community members displaced McElroy started the Anti-
Eviction Mapping Project, and the group published its first map in September 2013. In the
beginning McElroy worked on the map alone but other San Francisco residents and housing
rights activists quickly joined the project. Soon after the group was started oral history interviews
were incorporated to help capture personal narratives so often excluded from mapping and data
analytics.
The Mapping Project’s work builds upon a long history of critical cartography, or
analytical mapping that “calls things into question.”
28
In contrast to traditional cartography,
critical cartography involves using mapping as a tool for geospatial analysis. Critical cartography
is inherently political and often involves mapping data that reflects power relations. The idea that
maps can be used to study and solve political issues arose during the early twentieth century. For
example, Mark Jefferson (1863-1949) who was a geographer and cartographer at Eastern
Michigan University made some of the earliest attempts to map population demographics
including the languages spoken by different populations.
29
The ideas introduced in the twentieth
century about the political nature of mapping have paved the way for contemporary critical

27
Carmel DeAmicis, “Erin McElroy reveals what’s next for the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project,”
https://pando.com/2014/03/03/erin-mcelroy-reveals-whats-next-for-the-sf-anti-eviction-mapping-project/.
28
Jeremy W. Crampton, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, 2010, 39.
29
Ibid, 23.
20
cartography.
30
The Mapping Project’s work also builds upon the tradition of narrative
cartography. Oral histories have long been used to create or inform the creation of maps. More
recently, online mapping and digital tools have led to the emergence of audio-visual mapping
which combine multiple forms of digital media including audio records, photographs, and
videos. This combination of different forms of media “helps collects and convey emotions a
associated with places in oral stories.”
31

30
Critical cartography is a way of visually representing socio-political political structures and has been a topic of
interest for many artists. For example, in the 1950s Guy Debord introduced dérive, or unplanned tours through the
city guided by an individual’s emotional response to the built environment, to the avant-garde artists group
Situationist International of which he was a member. The group used dérive to study and map psychogeographies, or
the emotional and behavioral impact of geography on an individual. For more on the Situationsist International and
contemporary artists responding to their work see: Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, Theory of the Dérive and
Other Situationist Writings on the City (Barcelona: Museu D'Art Contemporani De Barcelona), 1996; Katharine
A. Harmon, You Are Here : Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New York, N.Y.: Princeton
Architectural Press), 2004; Katharine A. Harmon and Gayle Clemans, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists
Explore Cartography (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 2009.
31
Caquard, Sébastien, and William Cartwright. “Narrative Cartography: From Mapping Stories to Narrative Maps
and Mapping.” The Cartographic Journal, volume 51, issue 2 (2014): 101-106.

Figure 1: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, San Francisco Ellis Act Evictions, 2013-present, data visualization.
http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html.

21
Today the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has completed over 50 maps, some of which
include oral history interviews, audio, and video. Many of the maps visualize the displacement
happening across the Bay Area and its corresponding issues, including affordability, population
demographics, foreclosures, and rent and eviction increases surrounding private tech company
shuttle stops for companies such as Google and Apple. Other maps document issues relating to
equity in the city—issues that are closely tied to displacement but often receive less attention in
public discussion. For example, some of these maps trace the disappearance of public spaces and
the connection between gentrification and police surveillance. In addition to maps and oral
history interviews, AEMP’s website also offers a reading list, with resources explaining the often
misunderstood eviction and real estate speculation processes, along with links to zines, murals,
and a handbook all created by collective members.

Figure 2: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Narratives of Displacement and Resistance, 2017-present, data
visualization and audio. http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/narratives.html.

22

Internally, AEMP organizes itself into working groups tackling oral history interviews,
and data visualization. The two working groups often meet together during regular collective
meetings, and they also meet separately to work on specific projects. In this chapter I will focus
on two maps produced by AEMP: The San Francisco Ellis Act Evictions map, the first map
AEMP released in 2013 on the topic of Ellis Act evictions (Figure 1), and the Narratives of
Displacement map, released in 2017, (Figure 2) that combines data visualization with oral
history interviews in a dynamic interface. Finally, I will discuss how these two maps work in
conjunction with AEMP’s other advocacy and pedagogical tools.
AEMP is dedicated to advocating for affordable housing and engaging with diverse social
and political circumstances that affect affordability. One of the major issues AEMP advocates
against are no-fault evictions made possible by the Ellis Act, a provision adopted by the
California State Legislature in 1985 that allows landlords to remove rental units from the market
if they plan to demolish or sell their building.
32
However, the Ellis Act is widely abused by
landlords to evict tenants in rent-controlled apartments that are later re-listed at a higher rate.
Ellis Act Evictions is an animated, interactive map that visualizes Ellis Act evictions in
San Francisco between January 1994 and January 2018. While the map was first released in
September 2013, it is shared publicly on AEMP’s website and has been updated regularly to
incorporate San Francisco’s most recent eviction data. When opened, the Ellis Act Evictions map
includes a light grey and white map of San Francisco with a side bar to the right of the map. The
sidebar has a play button that a viewer can use to animate the map and a running total of the
number of Ellis Act evictions that have occurred in San Francisco since 1994 that increases as

32
Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, “Removal from Rental Market – Property
Owner,” http://hcidla.lacity.org/Removal-From-Rental-Market-Owners.
23
the map is played.
33
The animation begins by showing that zero Ellis Act evictions took place
between January 1, 1994 and June 22, 1994. This changes on June 23, 1994, when three
evictions took place at 115 Fredrick Street. As the animation plays and arrives at this point on the
slide bar a dot black dot with a red halo that appears on the map at 115 Fredrick Street and sends
out red pulses outwards. New spots are added to the map with various sized dots: the bigger the
dot, the larger the eviction. The points appear on the map without any additional information, but
when the cursor rolls over the points a small box pops up showing the number of units evicted,
the date the eviction took place, and the address. When the animation ends the map shows
clusters of evictions in San Francisco’s most affluent and trendy neighborhoods, including
downtown, Noe Valley, Nob Hill, the Mission District, the Castro, and the Haight. Meanwhile,

33
As of May 28, 2018 that map includes data through the beginning of January 2018 and reflects a total of 4,666
Ellis Act evictions since 1994. However, this number will increase when the map is next updated.
Figure 3: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Narratives of Displacement and Resistance, 2016, mural.
24
areas of the city that are further from downtown and the Mission and less accessible via public
transit including the Sunset, and Excelsior have experience substantially fewer evictions than
other areas of the city. This is likely due to the slightly lower cost of property and rents in these
areas and the decreased density of housing in the peripheral areas of the city.
Like the Ellis Act Evictions map, Narratives of Displacement and Resistance documents
the extent of no fault evictions in San Francisco from 1994 to 2016.
34
The map also visualizes
displacement in the East Bay Area representing Unlawful Detainers in Oakland, Fremont and the
City of Alameda from 2005 to 2015.
35
Each no-fault eviction or unlawful detainer is marked on
the map as a red dot. Blue dots scattered across the map denote a corresponding oral history
interview. The specific subject matter and length of each interview varies from interviewee to
interviewee. However, all of the interviewees speak to their own experiences, memories, and
sense of community identity tied to the area from which the interviewee was displaced.
AEMP has produced other work in addition to the maps and oral history interviews. The
majority of the resources they publish on their site fall into two categories: (1) those that help
publicize and share information from the maps and oral histories and (2) other information that
helps to explain housing policy, real estate speculation, and links to resources for tenants facing
evictions. The resources that AEMP produces take many forms: physical objects, an online
presence, participatory events and art exhibitions. The material objects that publicize their

34
No-fault evictions are evictions that are not based on any fault or action made by the tenant. Tenants who do not
pay rent or violate the terms of their lease can have their contracts terminated through an at-fault eviction because of
their contract violation. In contrast, no-fault evictions are usually based on the property owner’s decision to sell,
demolish, or move-into a unit. Ellis Act evictions are a type of no-fault eviction; Los Angeles Housing and
Community Investment Department, “Tenant is Not At-Fault Eviction,” http://hcidla.lacity.org/Eviction-Tenant-is-
Not-At-Fault-Renters.
35
Unlawful detainer lawsuits, sometimes called eviction lawsuits, are a type of court proceeding filed by property
owners wishing to evict a tenant. To evict a tenant, the property owner must file an unlawful detainer in the superior
court; State of California Department of Consumer Affairs, “Terminations and Evictions,”
http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/evictions.shtml.
25
research includes zines (Figures 4 and 5), a handbook, and a mural in San Francisco’s Clarion
Alley Mural Project (Figure 3). Their online presence incorporates social media accounts as well
as interviews with magazines, journals and publications. AEMP also leads workshops and
trainings, participates in conferences and exhibitions, and is part of a larger network of San
Francisco Bay Area tenants’ rights organizations. The diverse outreach and educational methods
the Mapping Project uses helps the collective reach a broad audience and reflects the individual
outreach and communication strengths of its members.
The mural the Mapping Project painted in San Francisco’s famous Clarion Alley Mural
Project (CAMP) depicts one of AEMP’s interactive online maps. The mural is titled Narratives
of Displacement and Resistance (Figure 3) after the map of the same name. The main focus on
the mural is a map of San Francisco with points on the map representing evictions. Surrounding
the map are several portraits of residents who have been evicted. Each resident is painted in a
purple hue in a circular frame creating a similar aesthetic to the circular purple dots of the map
that represent evictions. People visiting Clarion Alley can call a phone number listed to the left
of map to hear oral history interviews from displaced San Francisco residents. In addition to the
phone number, the mural’s title and a short description of the mural are painted to the left of
map. The placement of the text and phone number are similar to the pop-up side bar on the
interactive online map that provides context about the online version of the map.
The Mapping Project has also made zines that include screenshots and drawings of their
online maps. The first zine the Mapping Project created was called We Are Here. The zine
featured interviews with residents who had been displaced as well as essays and poetry about
displacement. In addition to text, the We Are Here included drawings, photographs, and images
of AEMP maps documenting displacement. The zine was meant to “represent a moment in San
26
Francisco’s history,” by portraying a diverse set of facts and perspective about displacement. The
zine acts a counter narrative to the overly simplistic descriptions of displacement as a “housing
crisis” or ”tech boom.”
36

The mural and zines AEMP have made are more traditional forms of artistic production.
However, these arts objects are made in response to AEMP’s primary work creating interactive
online maps. The mural and zines are arts objects and resources that further share the maps
AEMP makes and have been included in the group’s presentations of their work at arts events
and exhibitions hosted by YBCA and SFMoMA. However, the primary focus of AEMP’s work
in these arts spaces has been on their map making. Together the critical cartography work AEMP

36
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, “We Are Here Zine,” https://www.antievictionmap.com/zine-we-are-here/.
Figure 4 (left): Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, We Are Here, zine.
Figure 5 (right): Members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project assemble copies of We Are Here.
27
does and the supporting materials they make including murals and zines help constitute a form of
artistic production that centers around the interactive data visualization they share online.

AEMP in Relation to Arte Útil
Many qualities of AEMP’s work clearly fall in line with certain Arte Útil criteria. The
Mapping Project’s ability to respond to quickly to evictions and changing economic conditions
in the San Francisco Bay Area has been a key component of the popularity of their work among
tenant’s rights organizations which often cite and reference their maps. Working with a large
team of volunteers, many of whom have prior connections in the affordable housing and tenants’
rights communities, has helped AEMP respond to changing community needs. The Mapping
Project regularly updates its Ellis Act Eviction map and continues to conduct new research. As a
primarily volunteer run organization the groups capacity ebbs and flows with volunteers’
availability.
37
On balance, though, the Mapping Project has effectively evolved to respond to
changing community needs. This may be due in part the organization’s structural flexibility;
AEMP has been organized as a collective since it began. However, other aspects of the group’s
internal organization––including how frequently they meet and how projects are managed––have
shifted over time. AEMP meets more or less frequently and in teams or as a whole based on the
needs of the projects on which they are working. This flexibility combined with the devotion and
investment of volunteers has helped create a project that meets both Arte Útil’s project
sustainability criteria and the requirement that projects respond current urgencies.
The Mapping Project’s work documents the largely unseen widespread displacement. In
this sense AEMP’s work meets two more criteria by both functioning in real situations and by

37
Depending on availability of funding project leads sometimes earn a small stipend but overall the project is
largely volunteer organized.
28
challenging the field it operates within. The Mapping Project’s work challenges public policy
and real estate by shining a light on pressing social issues by visualizing the massive scale of
displacement. In particular, AEMP’s focus on the prevalence of Ellis Act evictions, regional
changes in housing affordability, and by publicly identifying landlords known to be “chronic
evictors” has challenged individual actors and overarching policies. In addition to visualizing big
data, AEMP ties oral history narratives into their work. The storytelling component of AEMP’s
practice is often cathartic for interviewees and helps convey to listeners the tremendous personal
impact dislocation has on individuals and families.
The way the Mapping Project engages with its audience falls in line with the Arte Útil’s
pedagogical and methodological requirement that artists exist not as authors of stagnant works
but as initiators of active projects. Mapping Project participants who share stories, analyze data,
and publicize the project’s research have helped initiate a larger critical discussion about
displacement and real estate speculation. The research and tools the Mapping Project produces
are used both by members of the general public and other political advocacy organizations, such
as tenant’s rights organizations like Tenants Together, Causa Justa/Just Cause, and the Eviction
Defense Collaborative. Each of these organizations has included the qualitative and quantitative
research AEMP has conducted in reports, on publicly available fact sheets, or on their websites.
Beyond the organizational uses of such tools, individuals who see AEMP’s maps and listen to
the oral histories can gain a better understanding the complex social, political and economic
forces that lead to displacement. This understanding is equally important for those who have
been evicted as it is for those who have not. In an area with a high no-fault eviction rate all
residents who are renters are potentially at risk of being displaced in the future. Additionally,
seeing stories of displacement highlighted as valuable community narratives in the SF Bay Area
29
validates the social and political significance of displacement in a political climate where
personal impact of displacement is regularly dismissed. There is an affective dimension to this,
as the personal testimony of oral history interviews are often emotional affairs. The symbolic
significance of highlighting narratives of displacement and the project’s pedagogical components
are important and beneficial for the Mapping Project’s diverse audiences.
In addition to the symbolic significance of AEMP’s work, the maps, zines and murals
they make help raise awareness about the expansive and devastating impacts of displacement in
the SF Bay area. Arte Útil’s framework is focused on artwork that creates measurable impacts.
Certain impacts like the amount of media coverage or the number of page visits to AEMP’s
online maps are quantifiable indicators that reflect the critical dialogue the Mapping Project’s
work has helped incite. Other aspects of AEMP’s work including referrals to tenant’s rights legal
clinics can also be measured. However, the full extent and impact of the critical dialogue that
AEMP’s work has helped spur cannot be quantified. It is impossible to know how this dialogue
has impacted the actions and perceptions of participants who have seen and engaged with
AEMP’s work. Arte Útil’s focus on the creation of quantifiable impacts can be applied to
AEMP’s work but does not take into consideration the full impact and depth of this critical
dialogue.
Lastly, the Mapping Project’s work proposes new uses for art and re-establishes art as a
system of transformation. Mapping as a practice is the visualization of geo-spatial information.
AEMP’s creative practice involves the production of interactive online maps that they have
shared in arts spaced as well as secondary materials that depict AEMP maps including zines and
the Clarion Alley mural. The Mapping Project uses the data visualization and secondary
resources that reproduce their data visualizations as part of a larger creative and activist practice
30
that models what a more inclusive and compassionate political process could look like. As a
consensus-based collectively run organization the Mapping Project strives to create a welcoming
environment to discuss public policy and development. The collective and inclusive approach
AEMP has taken to engaging with spatial politics can be seen as a critique of the San Francisco
Bay Area political process. While local government in the San Francisco Bay Area have
resources and staff dedicated to engaging with the public, overall local governments have not
effectively listened to, engaged with, or responded to the concerns about displacement residents
are facing. Meanwhile AEMP as a relatively small collective of part-time volunteers has
developed tools that help the general public understand real estate speculation, understand the
eviction process, and listen deeply to the narratives of displaced residents. AEMP’s artistic
practice involves creating tools, sharing narratives, and demonstrating the type of deep and
compassionate engagement with displaced communities largely absent from hierarchical political
processes.
Arte Útil provides a valuable framework for understanding the Mapping Project’s work.
The framework is useful in identifying and guiding an analysis of key aspects of AEMP’s work
which impact their ability to challenge local political and real estate systems. In particular, the
Arte Útil criteria focused on timing and sustainability are especially relevant to AEMP’s work
which has had to quickly evolve to respond to the changing community needs. However, Arte
Útil’s criteria are also pose certain limitations. The criteria alone do not consider the symbolic or
poetic significance of artwork. The framework is also heavily focused on measurable impacts
which when applied to complex dialogical projects like the Mapping Project calls into question if
and how critical dialogue can be effectively measured.

31

CHAPTER 3: THE LOS ANGELES POVERTY DEPARTMENT

The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a community-based theater group that
had been working in Skid Row since 1985. The acronym LAPD is an ironic reference to the Los
Angeles Police Department with which many of the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s members
have negative experiences as a result of the policing and criminalization of homelessness in Los
Angeles.
38
The LAPD’s origins and methodologies differ from the Anti-Eviction Mapping
Project, however, both groups share a commitment to housing equality for low-income and
homeless communities and a concomitant desire to shift regional policy through narrative-based
advocacy work. While the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project shares individual oral histories
through their online platform, mural, and zines, LAPD writes and stages performances based on
the lived experiences of Skid Row residents, who are also members of the LAPD theater
company. LAPD’s performances have addressed a diverse range of issues related to the health
and wellbeing of the homeless and low-income residents living in Skid Row including real estate
development, zoning, mental illness and more. Like AEMP, LAPD has explicitly stated that they
“make change by creating initiatives that bring together Skid Row service providers, grass roots
organizations and community members.”
39
LAPD has demonstrated an organizational interest in
shifting policy through an artistic practice that at times seems more akin to community
organizing than theatre. Several of LAPD’s performances, including What Fuels Development?
are based on community organizing work LAPD participated in then subsequently used as the

38
James McEnteer, Acting like It Matters: John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (North
Charleston, South Carolina: Streetwise Press), 2015.
39
Los Angeles Poverty Department, “LAPD History,” https://www.lapovertydept.org/lapd-history/.
32
subject matter for their performances. I chose to use Arte Útil as lens to better understand
LAPD’s practice because of the group’s desire to create work that is not only about public policy
but also deliberately attempts to influence it. In this sense LAPD’s work moves beyond the
traditional description of social practice as work “that involves people and communities in
debate, collaboration or social interaction” and instead aligns LAPD’s practice more closely with
Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil as a tool for creating lasting socio-political change.
40
The
chapter that follows includes a discussion of LAPD’s history, methodologies and an analysis of
their work as it relates to Arte Útil’s eight criteria. In the conclusion that follows I will discuss
the strengths and limitations associated with using Arte Útil as a framework for understanding
complex works of social practice artwork, like LAPD’s practice, that are intended to create
demonstrable change.

History
The Los Angeles Poverty Department was started by performance artist John Malpede
who came to Los Angeles from New York in 1984 to research homelessness in preparation for a
performance on the same topic. That year the New York-based arts organization Creative Time
commissioned Malpede to do a performance on homelessness in New York’s Battery Park as
part of their Art on the Beach series. Malpede came to Los Angeles to learn more about
homelessness at a time when the city infamously cracked down on homelessness prior to 1984
Olympics. At the time Skid Row was heavily policed in an effort that then-LA Police
Commander Billy Wedgeworth described as an “attempt to sanitize the area.”
41
During his time

40
Tate, “Art Term: Socially Engaged Practice,” http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socially-engaged-practice;
Paul O'Neill, "Tania Bruguera," Bomb, no. 128 (2014): 124-33.
41
James McEnteer, Acting like It Matters: John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (North
Charleston, South Carolina: Streetwise Press), 2015, 41.
33
in LA, Malpede met with legal advocates for homeless individuals from the Catholic Worker.
Malpede was inspired by the innovative approach to legal advocacy the group was using which
included testimonies from people living on the streets during court cases. Legal Aid attorney
Gary Balsi described the approach as way to paint a picture for judges most of whom were very
unfamiliar with the struggles and conditions facing homeless people in Los Angeles.
42

The research and interviews Malpede conducted informed his performance in Battery
Park, however, he returned to Los Angeles later that year, this time permanently. After moving
to Los Angeles, Malpede began working as a paralegal doing community outreach at the Inner
City Law Center (ICLC). A month after he had begun working at ICLC he received a grant
through the California Arts Council to allow him to work as an artist-in-residence at ICLC and
run theater workshops out of their offices in Skid Row. After putting up flyers, Malpede held his
first theater workshop for a group of thirteen community members. In the early days the
workshops focused on small improvisational performances including mock commercials and re-
enactments of peoples’ days. The workshops immediately appealed to people living on Skid Row
because it became a space where ignored and neglected people could have their voices heard.
Longtime LAPD member Charles Jackson described the appeal of the workshops, saying that
“most people in shelters didn’t meet many people who were interested in knowing about their
lives. The workshops were a venue where they could share their lives with people who cared.”
43

Two years after Malpede began holding theater workshops in Skid Row, he organized the
theater groups’ first performance, Sound of Clouds (1986) at the Boyd Street Theater in Skid
Row. Worried that some of the performer would not show up, the performance featured a series

42
Ibid.
43
Ibid, 51.
34
of monologues instead of a narrative featuring interactions between the different performers.
This way if a performer was a no-show, their monologue could be removed that night without
impacting the rest of the show. Each performer in Sound of Clouds developed a monologue about
an activity they enjoyed and how it related to their life. Jim Beame talked about his experience
playing baseball and his childhood memories. Another performer talked about washing laundry
as a meditative action that distracted him from his tumultuous relationship with his father. The
performance received rave reviews and was highlighted for the vulnerable and unexpected view
it provided on life living in Skid Row.
Stud Schwarts, the next performance LAPD organized, was a story member Jim Beame
helped develop. Instead of a series of monologues like Sound of Clouds, Stud Schwarts included
interactions between cast members. The result was at times chaotic, but LAPD felt that the chaos
and energy involved in the improvisation reflected the character and energy of Skid Row. Today,
most of LAPD’s performances involve loose narratives and incorporate a fair amount of
improvisation. Unlike traditional scripted performance, using an improvisational approach helps
make LAPD more inclusive. Many of the performers do not regularly show up because of the
amount instability in their lives and some of the members cannot read making memorizing lines
impossible. The flexible and improvised approach to performance has made LAPD’s work
possible.
44

While the size of their company has fluctuated over the years, today LAPD has seventeen
company members, including Malpede. LAPD accepts anyone who wants to be a member,
however, they have continuously worked with Skid Row residents for over thirty years to help

44
Ibid.
35
share the stories, ideas and experiences of members. Their performances are often partially
autobiographical and respond to recent events happening in Skid Row. LAPD’s performances
have empowered company members by highlighting and dramatizing the challenges they face on
a daily basis. The stories company members tell help challenges stereotypes and misconceptions
about what living on Skid Row is like. Additionally, by focusing in on the experiences of
company members LAPD draws attention to the experiences of homeless and poor community
members that are often ignored.

Methodology
The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) has been influenced by various theatrical
traditions including community theater, guerrilla theater, theater of the oppressed, and devised
theater. At the same time some of the LAPD’s methodologies and the project’s they have
developed are more closely aligned with community organizing than theater. When asked if he
considered LAPD’s work social practice or activist work in 2013, Malpede replied that LAPD
has intentionally tried to defy categorization and knowingly exists in both artistic and activist
realms.
45
This intentional blending of influences and genres has created an activist theater
practice that is unique to LAPD.
LAPD describes itself as a community theater group. Like most community theater
company’s LAPD welcomes community members interested in developing and performing
performances regardless of their experience level. The term “community theater” was coined by
Louise Burleigh in 1917. Also called “little theater” and “amateur theater,” community theater
has focused on local narratives as an alternative to dominant commercial narratives since its

45
Carol Zou, “Come in, We’re Open – Los Angeles Poverty Department,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQblXtBSLM8.
36
inception in the early 1990s.
46
Additionally, community theater has developed as not only a
creative practice but as a practice that builds and strengthens community cohesion. Like
contemporary and historic community theater troupes, LAPD uses community stories, struggles
and triumphs as the foundation for the work they write and perform.
In addition to drawing from community theatre, LAPD’s work is strongly influenced by
the history of guerrilla theater, a phrase first used in the late 1960s by R.G. Davis, a member of
the San Francisco Mime Troupe. At the time the San Francisco Mime Troupe preformed in
public spaces not intended for theatrical performance in an effort to reach a broader audience for
their work, much of which criticized the Vietnam War.
47
The evolution of guerrilla theater has
included numerous diverse theatrical groups that preform political work in public places.
However, not all of these groups have necessarily described themselves as guerrilla theater
groups. Influential guerrilla theater groups include the Bread and Puppet Theater and El Teatro
Campesino. Bread and Puppet Theater, where Malpede worked as an apprentice before founding
LAPD, was started in 1963 by Peter Schumann. Schumann has described affordable art, like the
low-cost public puppetry performances the group creates, as a human necessity like food or
bread.
48
El Teatro Campesino was founded in 1965 by members of Cesar Chavez’s United
Farmworkers Union participating in the Delano Grape Strike. El Teatro Campesino members
acted out short political performances in the bed of a pick-up truck and in union halls.
49
Like the
guerrilla theater troupes that have come before them LAPD performs in non-traditional

46
Twink Lynch, “From the Top: History of Community Theatre in America,” https://www.aact.org/community-
theatre-history.
47
Comparative Political Research Institute, “Guerrilla Theater: Intersection of Political Activism and Institutional
Performance,” http://ispo.fss.muni.cz/uploads/2download/mobsem2010/political_performance.pdf.
48
Bread and Puppet Theater, “Peter Schumann on 50 years of Bread and Puppet Theater,”
http://breadandpuppet.org/peter-schumann-on-50-years-of-the-bread-and-puppet-theater; James McEnteer, Acting
like It Matters: John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (North Charleston, South Carolina:
Streetwise Press), 2015, 7.
49
El Teatro Campesino, “About Us,” http://elteatrocampesino.com/about-us/.
37
performance spaces which has included organizing parades and performing in parks. LAPD also
performs in more traditional performance spaces such as museums, galleries, and the Skid Row
History Museum and Archive that LAPD founded in 2015.
Elements of LAPD’s performance are drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the
Oppressed. Boal was influenced by educator Paulo Freire’s text Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In
this seminal work, Freire advocated for pedagogy that treats students not as vessels to be filled
with information, but as individuals with their own knowledge and experience that are valuable
components of the education process.
50
Boal’s concept of Theater of the Oppressed, which he
elaborated on in a 1970s publication of the same name, is comprised of a series of theatrical
practices and exercises that incorporate audience engagement and are used to explore history and
social contexts. Boal believed that theater was not in itself revolutionary, but through audience
engagement could challenge audience members to think for themselves and “rehearse
revolution.”
51
One of Theater of the Oppressed’s tactics includes “newspaper theater” which
involves the reading and performance of newspaper article or factually-oriented works of writing
not intended for performance.
52
LAPD incorporates newspaper theater into their performance of
What Fuels Development? which features a reenactment of a Los Angeles Planning Commission
meeting based on meeting transcripts. The role “newspaper theater” plays in What Fuels
Development? is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
In the 2013 interview where Malpede described his work as “intentionally
interdisciplinary” he also identified “devised theater” as a methodological approach that has

50
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum, 2000).
51
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, (New York: Urizen Books, 1979).
52
Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, "From Theatre of the Oppressed," The New Media Reader (2003), 339-
352.
38
influenced LAPD’s work.
53
Devised theater, also called “collective collaboration,” is a theatrical
development and performance process where scripts are developed through a series of
improvised theater activities and workshops.
54
Devised theater is central to LAPD’s creative
process which draws from the experiences and perspectives of the Skid Row residents who are
company members.
Finally, LAPD’s work incorporates methods drawn from advocacy and grassroots
community organizing methodology. One of LAPD’s early projects involved placing a free
payphone in Skid Row that community members could use to call family anywhere in the world

53
Carol Zou, “Come in, We’re Open – Los Angeles Poverty Department,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQblXtBSLM8.
54
Martine K. Green-Rogers, “What is Devised Theatre?” The Theater Times (2016),
https://thetheatretimes.com/what-is-devised-theatre/.
Figure 6: Still from “What Fuels Development?” by the Los Angeles Poverty Department
showing the set for the performance.
39
in response to a statistic stating the most homeless individuals had not been in contact with any
family members for over a year.
55
During another project, LAPD members walked Skid Row to
register voters and more recently in 2016 members helped community members oppose the
proposed development of a restaurant with a full-service bar on the ground floor of a Single
Resident Occupancy (SRO) building home to formerly homeless individuals many of whom
were in recovery.
56
Each of these community actions were organized by LAPD in conjunction
with the Skid Row community and were later the subject of performances written and performed
by LAPD. Their process for producing performances incorporates ongoing grassroots organizing
that is later historicized through performances used to raise awareness and engage a wider public
with the social issues facing the Skid Row community.

What Fuels Development?
LAPD’s recent performance What Fuels Development? is a great example of the
character and form of LAPD’s performances. The performance retells and dramatizes the Skid
Row community’s opposition to the alcohol serving restaurant in the ground floor of an SRO.
The description below is based on a recording of What Fuels Development? when it was
performed at the Armory Center for the Arts on March 26, 2016. However, the performance has
traveled to several locations, and because of the semi-improvisatory method of the LAPD,
changes slightly with each rendition. LAPD continues to perform this particular work which was
mostly recently re-preformed in February of 2018 at the Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis,

55
Carol Zou, “Come in, We’re Open – Los Angeles Poverty Department,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQblXtBSLM8.
56
Ibid; Los Angeles Poverty Department. “What Fuels Development?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_CDVp4MW44.

40
Minnesota.
57

The hour and twenty-minute video of LAPD’s performance of What Fuels Development
at the Armory Center for the Arts starts by focusing in on a wall didactics audience members
walk by before entering the performance space. The didactics include photographs and a timeline
that help contextualize the history of LAPD’s work in Skid Row. After walking into the main
performance space guests see a large circular platform filled with café seats and tables (Figure
6). The space also includes a rectangular table, podium and flat screen television mounted on a
nearby wall.

57
Pangea World Theater, “What Fuels Development,” http://www.pangeaworldtheater.org/what-fuels-development.
Figure 7: Still from “What Fuels Development?” by the Los Angeles Poverty Department depicting the
reenactment of the Los Angeles Planning Commission hearing.
41
Upon entering the main room, guests are greeted by a restaurant host who gives them
menus and shows them to seats atop the platform. Shortly after the crowd is seated, a video
begins to play on a large television screen in the room. In the video Alice Callaghan, one of the
founders and former Board Member of the Skid Row Housing Trust, introduces herself and
describes her history working with the Skid Row Housing Trust. Callaghan explains that she and
several other Board Members left the Skid Row Housing Trust when the organization began
renting its buildings to for-profit real estate companies, instead of directly to formerly homeless
or chronically poor individuals. The interview helps set the stage for the following reenactment
of a City of Los Angeles Planning Commission meeting which is about a property owned by the
Skid Row Housing Trust.
After the video the ends, five performers dressed in blazers and ties walk into the room
and take a seat at a long table facing the audience members on the platform (Figure 7). The man
seated at the center of the table leans into the microphone on the table to announce the beginning
of the public hearing for a development project located at 542 S. Main Street in downtown Los
Angeles. Next, one of the men at the tables stands up and introduces himself as Charlie Rausch,
the Associate Zoning Administrator assigned to the planning case under review. LAPD member
Tom Grobe plays Rausch whose lines are based on the actual testimony in the Planning
Commission transcript. After introducing himself, Grobe explains the committee is reviewing a
request for a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) to sell alcohol at a restaurant with a full bar
proposed on the ground floor of The New Genesis, an SRO in Skid Row managed by the Skid
Row Housing Trust. To avoid exposing residents recovering from alcoholism to the restaurant,
Grobe’s character explains that the restaurant and upper-level residential units will have separate
entrances located at opposite sides of the building.
42

After Grobe completes his statement, a resident of The New Genesis, acted by performer
Walter Fears, approaches the podium at the opposite side of the platform across form the table
with the Planning Commission members. The resident gives his testimony and expresses
frustration about the six alcohol-serving business on street explaining that the community does
not need any more. The next resident to give testimony emphasizes the damage alcohol serving
restaurants cause in the Skid Row community and explains that those who benefit fiscally from
these land uses do not live in the community. Re-enactments of side conversations between
developers and proponents of the project follow the resident testimonies (Figure 8). During these
side conversations, developers and city employees working on the project heatedly discuss the
project’s new name, the artisanal meatball restaurant proposed as the ground floor tenant, and the
different types of craft cocktails the restaurant will serve. Then, several Council District and
Figure 8: Still from “What Fuels Development?” by the Los Angeles Poverty Department.
43
Planning Department employees meet over drinks to discuss how the proposed project could
negatively impact the downtown district by drawing businesses away from the restaurants in that
area. These three short scenes, which were developed by LAPD and not based on meeting
transcripts, portray the city officials working on the project as deeply out of touch with the Skid
Row community’s needs.
Throughout the rest of the performance scenes alternate between testimony given by
employees of the Skid Row Housing Trust and the discussions about the project over drinks
between government employees. The Director of the Skid Row Housing Trust explains that the
project will make the street safer and more welcoming, without addressing the specific impacts
on the community. Meanwhile government employees applaud themselves for the inclusion of
subsidized housing in the redeveloped building despite the fact that the redevelopment includes a
net decrease in affordable units and the addition of luxury artists’ lofts.
Towards the end of the performance, the scene returns to public comments at the
Planning Commission meeting, where it started. Resident after resident voices opposition to the
project questioning its ethos in the process. One member of the public expresses concerns over
the Skid Row Housing Trust’s conflict of interest in the project: it is acting as both a nonprofit
housing developer and as a landlord earning a profit from a market-rate tenant whose land use is
in conflict with their mission statement as a nonprofit serving formerly homeless individuals.
After an overwhelming number of public comments opposed to the CUP approval the Planning
Commission unanimously votes to deny the permit to serve alcohol.
58

58
Los Angeles Poverty Department, “What Fuels Development?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_CDVp4MW44.
44
LAPD in Relation to Arte Útil
LAPD’s layered, collaborative approach to producing devised theater includes advocacy
work that later becomes the subject of their performances. Company members part of LAPD
benefit from the community and the therapeutic effects of sharing their stories. Additionally,
company members earn income as performers. LAPD’s performances are also educational in
nature for audience members who may be unfamiliar with the many challenges and issues facing
Skid Row. The performances challenge preconceived notions about people living in Skid Row
by “placing the narrative of the neighborhood in the hands of neighborhood people.”
59

These interrelated elements of LAPD’s process fulfill many of Arte Útil’s core
requirements. The advocacy work LAPD does is timing specific and is done in response the
changing conditions in Skid Row. LAPD’s practice is also sustainable. Throughout LAPD’s
many years working in Skid Row the theater group has adapted to changing conditions and
continues to support the larger Skid Row community in a positive and sustainable way.
Additionally, their performances engage with real situations. The grassroots advocacy work they
do––which has included voter registration and organizing against unethical real estate
development––has had tangible impacts in Skid Row. In addition to participating in local
community organizing initiatives, LAPD creates a space for current community members to
share their stories sand creates jobs for company members.
Multiple components of LAPD’s practice challenge the field in which they operate. The
political nature of LAPD’s community organizing work and the subject matter of their
performances openly criticizing unethical policies and government practices. Highlighting the
narratives of homeless and low-income individuals living in Skid Row and engaging its residents

59
Los Angeles Poverty Department, “LAPD History,” https://www.lapovertydept.org/lapd-history/.
45
in a creative practice has also challenged the work of community outreach professionals and
homelessness service providers where these practices are not necessarily commonplace. When
LAPD first began in 1985 they were the only arts organization for homeless community in Skid
Row. However, their approach successfully challenged service providers who saw how
beneficial LAPD was for Skid Row residents and have since invested in arts programming for
homeless individuals. LAPD has also challenged the arts industry to stretch its understanding of
community art which is often perceived as separate from high art and professional performance.
However, LAPD has gained national acclaim as a community art organization that has toured
internationally, performance in museums, and received funding from prestigious arts funders.
60

Criteria two, three, four and seven discussed above create a helpful framework for
understand LAPD’s impact. However, applying Arte Útil’s concept of initiators and users is
more complicated. Unlike AEMP where initiators and user are clearly defined, LAPD company
members are both initiators and users. Members develop and perform performances which
makes them initiators. However, they also participate in an organization developed by John
Malpede who would also be considered an initiator. Members benefit from the income they earn
and the therapeutic process of collective storytelling which is an aspect of usership. LAPD’s
work also fulfills Arte Útil’s idea of initiators and users and its requirement that projects are
ongoing and involve active participation. LAPD also has practical and beneficial outcomes for
company members satisfying criteria number six. However, the terms initiator and user cannot
easily be applied to LAPD’s work because company members occupy both roles.
Additionally, the term user carries with it some problematic association in this particular

60
LAPD has received grants from many arts grant making organizations including Americans for the Arts, the Los
Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Mike Kelley Foundation for
the Art, and the Rauschenberg Foundation among others.
46
context. AAU’s rational for employing the term user is to emphasize an artwork’s usefulness.
However, in recovery communities being a user is a term often associated with drug or alcohol
use. Additionally, critics of public assistance for the poor often criticize poor individuals and
families as people using the system in a way that is advantageous. In this context referring to
people who are chronically poor, homeless and/or recovering from drug or alcohol addiction as
users evokes unintended negative associations that detract from the understand of the term
intended by AAU.
Arte Útil’s first and last criteria are to propose new uses for art in society and to re-
establish aesthetics as a system of transformation. LAPD’s advocacy-oriented practice has had a
transformative impact in Skid Row. Criteria eight specifically references the transformative
impact of aesthetics. However, LAPD’s impact is caused by their artistic practice as a whole not
only by its visual elements. Additionally, LAPD proposed new uses for art in society when it
first introduce arts programing in Skid Row over twenty years ago. LAPD’s development of
high-quality often experimental community arts programming and deep engagement with the
Skid Row community has created new uses for art.

47

CONCLUSION

As a sub-genre of social practice art, Arte Útil is effective in recognizing the differences
between socially engaged artwork intended to create demonstrable impacts and artwork that
presents a socio-political critique without offering implementable solutions. This distinction is
important. To responsibly engage with the additional social responsibilities and practical
limitations that come with implementing projects meant to create lasting change these types of
artwork need to be recognized and evaluated separately from other forms of social practice art.
For example, AEMP and LAPD’s work requires that they navigate practical and ethical issues
unique to art projects that involve ongoing community engagement. While interviewing people
about their eviction experiences, AEMP members carefully discuss sensitive and often traumatic
subject matter with interviewees. LAPD has developed a semi-improvisational performance style
in part to accommodate its members some of whom cannot memorize lengthy lines verbatim.
61

To evaluate the impact and merit of AEMP and LAPD, their projects need to be considered not
just on the basis of their visuals artifacts and performances they produce, but also by the methods
they use to interact with the public. In particular, the methods social practice projects use when
working with vulnerable populations need to be carefully considered because artists unfamiliar
with the social and ethical issues involved in working with these communities may
unintentionally harm others.
The strongest aspect of Arte Útil is the distinction it draws between general social

61
James McEnteer, Acting like It Matters: John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (North
Charleston, South Carolina: Streetwise Press), 2015.

48
practice art and social practice art intended to be implemented and make lasting change.
Recognizing this distinction may help pave the way for more detailed and critical study of this
particular sub-genre of social practice. However, the criteria Arte Útil uses to outline these
difference is somewhat limited in its application. The eight criteria are poorly defined and not
easily applicable to all artwork that creates a lasting socio-political impact. The analyses of
AEMP and LAPD’s work in relation to Arte Útil demonstrates some of the challenges associated
with applying one set of criteria to various different projects.
Some of the criteria are incredibly helpful in investing how and why AEMP is impactful.
Criteria three and seven specify that projects must respond to current urgencies while also
producing art in a sustainable way. Focusing on these aspects of the Mapping Project’s practice
helped highlight how important flexibility is in their work. Having the ability to meet more
regularly, as a whole, or in sub-groups depending on the nature of the projects they are currently
working on has helped the Mapping Project adjust to changing regional priorities. Applying
these criteria highlights a specific aspect of AEMP’s practice that other social practice or
community oriented projects can learn from.
However, other criteria did not translate so seamlessly. Arte Útil’s focus on measurable
impacts overlooks the symbolic and poetic significance of deeply listening to oral history
narratives about displacement. Some aspects of the critical conversations about displacement
AEMP encourages can be measured. For example, the amount of media coverage the group
receives or the number of times a specific oral history is listen to online can be counted.
However, how deeply a user engages with AEMP’s work or how it impacts their understanding
of their community is not quantifiable. By conceiving of usefulness as an impact that is always
measurable Arte Útil does not consider the full extent of the Mapping Project’s engagement with
49
community members.
Similarly, applying Arte Útil’s framework to LAPD has strengths as well as draw backs.
Some of the criteria create a helpful framework for understanding the group’s work. In
particular, analyzing how LAPD challenges the fields in which it operates emphasizes how
influential the group has been in the fields of professional theater, community art, and
community advocacy. LAPD has challenged what it means to be a professional and community
theater group by creating a platform for Skid Row residents to reframe their narrative of life
living in Skid Row. In this way LAPD has also created new roles for art in society and responded
to its current socio-political climate.
Yet some aspects of Arte Útil are not easily applied to LAPD’s work. For example,
applying the roles of initiators to LAPD’s practice oversimplifies the dual roles company
members play as people who both create art and benefit from the process. Additionally, the word
users carries with it negative unintended associations when used to describe people who poor
and/or recovering from addition. Additionally, it is not always clear which measurable impacts
LAPD set out to create and which were the result on deep ongoing engagement with
disenfranchised Skid Row residents. Arte Útil focuses on if and how measurable impacts were
made without addressing whether or not these impacts were intentional.
Arte Útil’s final criteria, to re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation, refers
specifically to the visual arts overlooking the transformative elements of performance and
storytelling included in both AEMP and LAPD’s work. Overall, the eight criteria to be
considered Arte Útil can be useful for considering specific aspects of an artworks methodology
or impacts. However, the criteria cannot reliably be applied to all works as AAU suggests.
The way AAU has positioned itself as an authority on Arte Útil further limits the genre’s
50
ability to expand and evolve. As an institution AAU is devoted to the study of Arte Útil and has
shared what it considers to be a definitive definition of the sub-genre. AAU also manages an
archive that reviews Arte Útil projects which involves reviewing submissions and deciding if the
work qualifies as Arte Útil before it is added to the online archive. At the same time, the online
archive includes some projects that are not clearly works of art or associated with the art. For
example, the online education platform Coursera that broadcasts university lectures for free is
included in the archive without a description of how this project is connected to the arts. Projects
in the archive include a project description but not a break down of how the project conforms to
Arte Útil’s criteria. The varied and sometimes convoluted way in which AAU has positioned
itself in relation to Arte Útil—as the manager of an interactive platform but also an authority
offering at times muddied descriptions of the field—limits critical engagement with Arte Útil.
As a theoretical framework Arte Útil recognizes the difference between general social
practice art and art intended to create demonstrable social and economic impacts. This in and of
itself is an incredible contribution to the study of this type of social practice art. However, more
critical engagement is needed to further define what Arte Útil is and is not. The criteria AAU
presents cannot be effectively applied as absolute requirements to wide breath of social practice
projects creating measurable impacts outside of the arts industry. Additionally, an artwork that
impacts fields outside of the arts should also be evaluated in terms of its ethical and
methodological approach to interdisciplinary work. Currently, a work of Arte Útil may meet
eight criteria, but may also approach collaboration with vulnerable populations that is
unintentionally harmful or dangerous for those communities. A responsible and critical
framework for interdisciplinary activist artwork that involves deep community engagement must
evaluate projects based on the project’s responsible community engagement. Additional, a robust
51
analysis of social practice art creating demonstrable impact should also include an analysis of the
artists’ intention, and the symbolic and poetic significance of the work.
The level of authority AAU holds over Arte Útil limits critical and theoretical
engagement with this type of art. Social practice art meant to create measurable impacts outside
of the arts industry should continue to be studied, especially as this type of art gains popularity
along with the growth of the wider field of social practice. However, AAU has presented an
inflexible criteria used to evaluate this type of art and by reviewing submissions to the digital
archive has given itself the ability to approve or deny an artworks inclusion in the field. To
promote more engagement with this type of art AAU should position itself as a proponent of but
not an authority on Arte Útil. Meanwhile, the arts industry should continue to critically study this
particular type of art while understanding its differences from general social practice art.

52

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis analyzes Tania Brugueria's concept of Arte Útil, a framework for identifying and evaluating artwork that creates socio-political change. In the nascent field of social practice, Bruguera's concept offers a valuable framework that addresses the social, ethical, and practical issues associated with this particular sub-genre of art. This thesis critiques Arte Útil's eight criteria as identified by the Asociación de Arte Útil, and applies the framework to artwork created by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department are community-based arts collectives using art to advocate for affordable housing and homeless services. The Los Angeles Poverty Department is a theater group comprised of resident living in Skid Row, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project develops interactive digital maps. Both collectives incorporate storytelling into their practices in an effort to reshape dominant cultural narratives about homelessness and displacement.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Smale, Alexandra Lee (author)

Core Title Evaluating art for social change: the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department in relationship to Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil; Evaluating art for social cha...

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Master of Planning / Master of Arts

Degree Program Planning / Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 08/14/2018

Defense Date 08/02/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Anti-Eviction Mapping Project,Arte Útil,Asociación de Arte Útil,Los Angeles Poverty Department,OAI-PMH Harvest,social practice

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Campbell, Andy (committee chair), Kim, Annette (committee member), Moss, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email asizemoresm@gmail.com,smale@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-65743

Unique identifier UC11671660

Identifier etd-SmaleAlexa-6633.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-65743 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SmaleAlexa-6633.pdf

Dmrecord 65743

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Smale, Alexandra Lee

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA