The explosive growth of Skid Row in the late 1970s and 1980s, simultaneous with the dismantling of the welfare state under Reagan, was preceded by the erasure of downtown's Bunker Hill neighborhood. The ensuing commercial redevelopment moved affordable housing away from the city’s center, further increasing the racial and economic segregation already prevalent in L.A.'s DNA. In "There Used to Be Vacant Lots," Fiona Bryson charts the legacy of downtown artists who lived and worked alongside Skid Row's unhoused throughout the 1980s, observing, activating, and creating community within L.A.'s forgotten spaces.

Susan Silton first moved to downtown Los Angeles in the early 1980s and has been immersed in the city’s multiple worlds ever since. Her work in many ways focuses on the acts of gathering and witnessing. In September 2018, Susanna Newbury sat down with the artist to discuss decades of development and gentrification in Los Angeles and pinpoint how Silton’s work frames and criticizes an active art of lyricism and its political grounding in a contracting public realm.