Los Angeles Poverty Department Founding Artistic Director John Malpede

I’m a big believer in sleep learning. So sometimes from dreams, sometimes just waking up and having the problem solved, or being awake in the middle of the night.

I’m a big believer in sleep learning. So sometimes from dreams, sometimes just waking up and having the problem solved, or being awake in the middle of the night.
How did you get into trouble when you were a kid?

I never really got in serious trouble. But I’ll tell you, in my grade school, we were told that everyone would have an honor before they graduated middle school. And so the beginning of my sixth grade year, I went to the principal’s office and I said, “Hey, you know, where’s my honor? It hasn’t shown up yet.” She said, “Well, you’re a traffic guard.”

I was unimpressed. “Well, you can introduce the school board president at some school-wide assembly.” So I said, “OK, I’ll consider that an honor.” And then I introduced him as the president of the United States. So.

The Grand Union. The Grand Union was a group in New York that sort of devolved from the Yvonne Rainer dance company, when they were doing more and more collaborative improvisational stuff. Most of them were highly trained dancers. They would just show up, without any preconception, and start warming up. And that would turn into the event, and there was dancing in it, but also these weird little vignettes that would turn into one thing and then they would hallucinate into something else, and then they would fall apart. It was really magical. What was beautiful is you could see failure in progress, as well as success in progress. Then someone would just say, “OK, I think we’re done.” And either everyone would acquiesce to that, or just a couple of people would keep going for another half an hour. That had a big impact on me.

I was living in New York, being a performance artist, in ’84. I came here [to Los Angeles] right when there were a lot of people living on the street. I was writing a performance about homelessness in New York, and I went to the board of supervisors here and met people coming out of the Catholic Worker. One of them was Nancy Mintie, who had started the law project there, which became Inner City Law that year.

Later on, she invited me to write a California Arts Council artists-in-residence grant. And when I came back in the spring, she had gotten some money from Legal Aid [Foundation of Los Angeles] and the homeless unit of Legal Aid. She and Gary Blasi, who was the head of that project, hired me as an outreach paralegal. So suddenly, I had a career.

That made a big difference because it put me in touch with so many different realms of life here in L.A.—paying attention to local government, being on the frontline. I mean, I was going to every welfare office in the county and hanging out for days fighting for what people should have been getting. It was a beautiful way of introducing me to Los Angeles because I really felt a part of it.

I don’t think I’ve had any guilty pleasures in quarantine. It’s very cliché, I’ve been baking a lot. Baking bread. The biggest pleasure is we’ve been going to the Santa Monica Mountains every Sunday for a hike. Before I’d been to like Topanga State Park a hundred million times, Will Rogers a hundred million times, but now we’re going to all these places we’d never been and putting together the puzzle of the paths and the mountains. A lot of deep breaths—really beautiful.

I’d say, “Surprise me.”

I have a shirt that I found in my mother’s basement when she was still alive that belonged to I’m not sure who. It’s a designer short-sleeve shirt. It’s midnight sky blue, and it has these stars—each line is a little [star], some are very bright, and they’re very small. And then the next line is smaller and less bright, less bright, less bright… It’s not a convincing replication of the sky, but it has a certain kind of magical thing to it.

Well, I’m here. I don’t know if that surprises me, but it’s a good thing. My wife, [Henriëtte Brouwers], is a Dutch person, although she’s now an American as well, but I guess that’s surprising. We go to the Netherlands once or twice a year, although we haven’t been there for a while. I had never been anywhere except for the U.S. and Canada until I was like 40 years old.

I did a large project in Kentucky, and it went on for a very long time. A bunch of artists were invited to do a project with Appalshop, which is an original art center in Eastern Kentucky in the coal fields. It started in the ’60s; it’s a bunch of artists who wanted to represent Eastern Kentucky from the point of view of Eastern Kentucky. I proposed a number of projects, and eventually I found one that people went for.

The project was to recreate Robert Kennedy’s field hearings that he did around poverty in Appalachia in 1968. I decided to do that because people are not interested in ignoramuses like myself coming there with no knowledge of Eastern Kentucky and claiming to represent it in something. My motto was “recreate everything, create nothing.” It got to be a huge project—hundreds of people were involved, including a Kennedy who had a Kentucky accent rather than a Boston accent.

I was spending half my time there, half my time here. Meanwhile, Henriëtte was trying to get her green card, and we had an immigration lawyer in Brentwood. We flew in from Eastern Kentucky and the next day we went to his office in Brentwood. And people looked really weird. It was quite a culture shock—there was just too much Botox. I was really freaked out.

Oftentimes we start with the title, and then we have to grow into it. Skid Row History Museum and Archive is a good example of that. You just make it up and then make it happen.