Hot Boxx Girls by Darwin Bell

Exhibition Run: September 5 - September 29

Recently named “Best Street Photographer” by SF Weekly, Darwin Bell has captures the queens of the Hot Boxx Girls befriending and befamilying adoring crowds every weekend at Aunt Charlie’s.
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Darwin Bell has lived in San Francisco for almost 30 years and sees the city as his photographic canvas. Specializing in colors and compositions, he takes the big picture and narrows it down to abstracts and ideas.
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This event is part of the Tenderloin Museum’s 2019-2020 public arts program about the pioneering drag queen performers at the legendary Aunt Charlie’s. Aunt Charlie’s is one of the oldest continuously operating queer bars in San Francisco, one of the last working class queer bar in San Francisco, and the last of its kind in the Tenderloin district. Our project aims to celebrate and lend visibility to Aunt Charlie’s as a remarkable space of socio-historical importance that is graced nightly by offbeat, eccentric characters whose seemingly idiosyncratic lives open up universal themes related to beauty, community, and self-acceptance.

Aunt Charlie’s: San Francisco’s Working Class Drag Bar highlights the work of numerous LGBTQ artists with a history of working in the neighborhood, and who reflect diverse approaches to portraiture: James Hosking, Tim Synder, Raphael Villet, Marissa Leitman, and Darwin Bell. In addition to launching their work as exhibitions, the artists’ work will be assembled into an original art book, complemented by oral histories, interviews, and a critical introduction written by Susan Stryker.

Our project hopes to draw into focus the Tenderloin’s low-income LGBTQ community, to reflect on the area’s history as a center of drag performance, and to engage the intersectionality of drag as it relates to questions of class, race, gender, and beyond.