PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE IMAGES.
Los Angeles' Skid Row district was recently described as the highest
concentration of homeless persons in America by the New York Times.
Although, perhaps well-meaning, government "solutions", lock the police and the homeless, alike,
into a captivity of futile war.
Above : "Centurion & Bound Lamb".
(photo rory white lamp art project / copyr rory white)
LAMP COMMUNITY :
Lamp Community offers Services, Advocacy, and Community to Men and Women
challenged with Mental Illness and Homelessness in the hard pressed
Skid Row sector of Los Angeles, Downtown Central-East.
Founded by the cutting edge work of Mollie Lowery and Frank Rice in 1985,
and currently led by Executive Director Casey Horan and Deputy Director Shannon Murray
Lamp chose to attempt to meet the needs of the humans it serves,
from a dynamic position of equality, "human to human", spurning the
prevalent condescension and professional apathy that has plagued
much of this country's efforts to address the needs
of the homeless mentally ill.
BELOW : TENT ENCAMPMENT
Two blocks from Lamp Art Project Studio & three blocks from Lamp Community's Lamp Village
Skid Row, Los Angeles. Aug. 18, 2003.
Below : cardboard, blankets, cheap blue plastic tarps, shopping
carts, and any available item, must be used to provide shelter.
Many perish from the rains, the cold, and the relentless heat of summer.
Remarkably, Lamp has, for 20 years now, continued successfully in this goal,
establishing a virtually unprecedented, non-condescending, and
radically efficacious methodology in the field of human services.
Asserting the simple equation that compassion can ONLY
be accomplished from a positon of true human equality,
Lamp has served thousands of human beings, in the unforgiving testing grounds
of Los Angeles' Skid Row sector.
In Pulitzer Prize winning articles by the Los Angeles Times and in Reports by the
State of California, Lamp Community has been recognized
as a clear approach to reversing the abandonment and devastation that has
beset our country's homeless mentally ill.
LAMP ART PROJECT.
Compared to the massive amount of services, food, shelter, and advocacy for medical
and psychiatric care, which Lamp offers to the people it serves, the Lamp Art Project is,
admittedly, a small component.
Nevertheless, the Art Project is a particularly, and poignantly, CRITICAL and VISIBLE
component of Lamp.
This is because, although one can show photographs of meals being offered and shelter
provided, it is difficult to show photographs of the internal healing of human self-esteem,
the strengthening of mental health, and the self-actualization achieved
in this atmosphere.
Yet art is the mirror of society.
Art provides a visible manifestation of human worth and meaning and healing.
Art is healing in itself. Creativity is essential, not superfluous, to human life.
Yet, furthermore, art provides a picture, almost like an X-ray, Cat-Scan, or MRI,
of the invisible things of the human soul or psyche.
For this reason, your visual tour through the Lamp Art Project Website gives you
a unique inside view into the life of Lamp Community and, notably, the psycho-social
healing dynamic at work within that community.
Thus we encourage you to continue this tour of our website.
photos text & web design rory white (copyr)
|
|
