2220 Arts + Archives

2220 Arts + Archives operates on the ground floor of a former church at 2220 Beverly Boulevard in Historic Filipinotown, adjacent to Echo Park and Downtown LA. It is a volunteer-run, cooperatively programmed cultural center that is one of the most genuinely interesting venues in Los Angeles. The building houses multiple rooms and stages as well as a working archive of audio and video recordings, books, and ephemera documenting experimental music, film, and art communities from Los Angeles and abroad. The venue was formerly home to Bootleg Theater and currently hosts roughly a dozen longstanding LA-based arts nonprofits and independent programmers including LA Filmforum, Black Editions, Mythscience, Pehrspace, the Poetic Research Bureau, and Wild Up. These groups curate the majority of the calendar, each hosting one to two events per month. The result is a programming slate that spans creative and improvised music, avant-garde performance, interdisciplinary film, poetry, talks, and hybrid events that resist easy categorization. Ticket prices are deliberately kept accessible, typically between ten and thirty dollars, and many events are free. The crowd on any given night is as eclectic as the programming: musicians, artists, academics, and curious listeners who have already exhausted the conventional calendar. 2220 is not interested in filling every date on the calendar or competing with entertainment venues in a traditional sense. What it is interested in is building a community around adventurous and non-commercial work, and it has built a strong one. Age restrictions apply when the bar lounge is operating; all-ages events are common when the lounge is closed.