La Plaza: A Center of Injustice and Transformation in Los Angeles
February 9-July 16, 2023

As the birthplace of Los Angeles, La Plaza has been the center of diversity, social change, and strife. A place where Native Americans, settlers of African, Mexican, and Spanish descent, immigrants from China and Italy, and Anglo-Americans lived and worked together. The diversity of the plaza gave way to transformation–a free speech area, a non-segregated drinking fountain, the forming of workers’ associations, and a home for exiled revolutionaries who called for social and political change through their art. Simultaneously, the plaza was a place of injustices where racism gave way to deportation, massacre, slave auctions, and police surveillance. Throughout its history, La Plaza has been a place of protest where the city’s inequalities are fought against to ensure equality for all its residents.