Hosted by the TurkxTaylor initiative & Tenderloin Museum

Saturday, August 26th | 7:00-9:00 pm 

At Aunt Charlie's | 133 Turk St. SF, CA 94102

Join us to commemorate the Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966, a landmark event where the queer and trans community rose against police brutality, years before the Stonewall Riot. As we gather at Aunt Charlie’s — the last queer bar in the Tenderloin — we'll celebrate this legendary event, keeping in mind the historic site is currently operated as a halfway house by a private prison corporation. 

Weather permitting, projection activist Alan Marling will shine messages on the Turk and Taylor building. Let’s come together to envision ways to liberate the building and reimagine a more just future for the historic site.

*Feel free to stay for The Hot Boxxx Girls drag show at 10 pm ($5 cover)

Free* | Email info@turkxtaylor.com to RSVP

“When Struggle Gave Improvisation the Blues” is a two act theater-poetry-performance play by the artist, poet, and playwright Charles Blackwell. 

Saturday August 12, 2023 | 3-5pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

It is a play about jazz music in relationship to the African American socio-political and socio-cultural events of the 1950’s and 1960s. The play is written in poetic form. It captures historical events with short lines related to episodes in history. Other parts of the play are interwoven in fictional poetic lines to present the mood of the jazz idiom. Join us for this special reading of this original work at the Tenderloin Museum, featuring several familiar faces from the neighborhood in the cast. A special Saturday afternoon program!

Featuring Shavonne Allen, Howard Jennings Jr., Greg Pond, Sylvester Guard Jr., Sawyer Arkilic, Barbara Saunders, and Charles Curtis Blackwell.

Made possible with support from Hospitality House.

Free! All Welcome! Register via Eventbrite

Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers opens a second season of TLM’s Sounds of the Tenderloin live music series with a extended set & ensemble for a very special Concert at the Cadillac, the long-running concert series geared to the residents of the historic hotel that is also the physical home of the Tenderloin Museum!

Friday August 11, 2023 | 1:00pm - 2:30pm

At the Cadillac Hotel | 380 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102 (next door to the Tenderloin Museum)

Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers got their start as a band in the late 1980s performing at The Blue Lamp, a long running Tenderloin dive bar that catered to the theater crowd and a hard crowd of local regulars. Ever since, Lavay and bandleader Chris Siebert have cultivated the big band sound in SF, and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers often feature an intergenerational mix of players, the more senior of whom had roots in the Fillmore’s robust jazz scene and who form the bedrock of the jazz community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many years and career milestones later, Lavay & her band still hold a lot of love for the TL, and on August 11th they’re going to play it out loud at the Cadillac Hotel for an extended Concert at the Cadillac with an extended horn section to create an extra large big band sound!

Free | All Welcome | Mask Wearing Required

Join the Tenderloin Museum and LaborFest  for an evening of global poetry for human rights and equality for all featuring poets from across the Bay Area, including the Revolutionary Poets Brigade!

Thursday July 27, 2023 | 4:30 - 7:30PM

at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy Street SF, CA 94102

Presented as part of Education for Action: California Labor School, 1942-1957, a collaboration between TLM & SFSU’s Labor Archives that celebrates the radical, union-founded worker’s school, LABORFEST POETRY was inspired by CLS’ remarkable for its efforts to educate the “whole person” by offering a robust complement of humanities courses in tandem with classes on trade skills and organizing.

The Revolutionary Poets Brigade is a group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to bringing positive change in the world through the power of poetry. They are poised to gather for community actions at any venue . . . including the streets! Founded in 2009, they call on all poets to put their powerful words in the service of struggles already in motion. Featured members of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade include Lisbit Bailey, Kristina Brown, John Curl, D.L. Lang, Karen Melander-Magoon, Sarah Menefee, Dorothy Payne, Roarschock, Nina Serrano, Raymond Nat Turner and others! Open mic to follow scheduled readers!

Workers’ Voices, Workers’ Power kicks off the program with short monologues & spoken word pieces from the picket line to the protest rally and beyond! For more information contact Bill Shields at billshieldssf@gmail.com

Free! No registration required!

Saturday July 22, 2023 | 3-4pm 

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Join us for a special presentation on the experience of women who lived in the Tenderloin’s residential hotels and worked in the downtown retail and food service industries in the first half of the 20th century. Presented as part of the annual SF Labor Fest and TLM’s special exhibit Education for Action: California Labor School, 1942-1957.

Longtime SF City Guide and professor of city & regional planning Linda Day shares her ongoing research on the San Francisco waitresses and saleswomen who lived downtown in the early 20th century, an overlooked segment of the Tenderloin population who deftly navigated organized labor and the neighborhood’s unique built environment to benefit greatly from union wages and affordable housing development. Building on Paul Groth’s seminal book on life in residential hotels, Living Downtown, Day’s qualitative study links the achievement of union wages, enforcement of increasingly specific building codes, and privately developed single room occupancy hotels (SROs) and small affordable apartments to waitresses and saleswomen’s ability to live in safe, comfortable downtown housing.

Free (or a $10 suggested donation is welcome! No registration required)

Explore the rich history of the labor movement in the Tenderloin on foot! TLM Program Director Alex Spoto and City Guide Linda Day will lead a special iteration of the museum’s weekly walking tour in advance of Dr. Day’s presentation “Union Wages and Housing Development: San Francisco Waitresses and Saleswomen Living Downtown, 1910-1941.”

Saturday July 22, 2023 | 1-2:30pm 

Meet at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

The Tenderloin has always been and continues to be a densely populated enclave of primarily working class people, and thus the neighborhood sports a rich history of organized labor and vibrant working-class culture. On this walking tour, we’ll visit key places in the labor movement, including union halls, residential hotels, sites of picket lines and protests, as well as the former home of the California Labor School! This Labor History Walking Tour of the TL is presented as part of Education for Action: California Labor School, 1942-1957, a collaboration with LARC that celebrates the radical, union-founded worker’s school. Established in the TL, the California Labor School was remarkable for its efforts to educate the whole person by offering a robust complement of humanities courses in tandem with classes on trade skills and organizing. The tour will last approximately 80 minutes, and will be followed by Linda Day’s presentation at 3pm. Attend one or both!

Free (or a $10 suggested donation) | (capacity limited to 20 / register via Eventbrite)

LaborFest presents a book talk with leading radical African American trade unionist Clarence Thomas who will discuss a newly published book of writings by Cleophas Williams, the first African American president of storied SF union ILWU Local 10. 

Thursday July 20, 2023 | 5-7PM

at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy Street SF, CA 94102

In concert with TLM’s ongoing special exhibit, Education for Action: California Labor School 1942-1957, LaborFest presents a book talk with Clarence Thomas, leading radical African American trade unionist and 3rd generation retired member of International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 who organized (and wrote an introduction to) a new book called Cleophas Williams: My Life Story in the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 10 (DeClare Publishing, 2023).  This book is a compilation of Cleophas Williams’ writings that depicts the esoteric world of a working waterfront and the challenges, achievements, and problems Williams faced as the first African American president of ILWU Local 10, a union known for its legacy of militancy and international solidarity.

Free! No registration required

LaborFest presents a panel conversation that will look at the Writers Guild Of America West strike and what it portends for the rest of the working class.

Thursday July 13, 2023 | 5:30 - 7:30PM

at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy Street SF, CA 94102

The strike of 11,000 writers according to the members is existential. The development and use of artificial intelligence could destroy the industry and force them to become gig worker without living wages, healthcare and retirement. This is also a threat to millions of other workers in transportation, healthcare, education and the building trades.

Speakers:
James Dalessandro, WGAW past Bay Area Picket Captain and filmmaker
Adrienne Williams, Distributed AI Research Institute & Amazonia Organizer
Robert Ovetz, SJSU Instructor, Journalist and Author

Free! Sponsored by LaborFest!

The “Black, blind, gay, sexy artist of San Francisco” Lord Frederick will be present to discuss his interdisciplinary practice across sculpture, fashion, illustration, and poetry, as well as his first solo exhibition Memory of Sight, on view at TLM through July 29! 

July 6, 2023 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm

At the Tenderloin Museum

398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

A leather man, a doll enthusiast, and a spiritualist, Lord Frederick lives his personal style unabashedly and completely. He can often be seen navigating the chaotic streets of the TL dudded out in chaps and sporting a wig of silvery white. Imagination and nostalgia animate his present and his capacity to thread joy, exuberance, and whimsy into his trademark handmade dolls. With Memory of Sight, Lord Frederick invites attendees to “see what he remembers seeing, and to see what he sees now.” In a world increasingly dominated by visual culture, Lord Frederick upends the primacy of the visual, channeling his sensory understanding of the world to subvert commonly held assumptions about identity, race, and ability.

This artist talk is presented in conjunction with the monthly SF First Thursday Art Walk in the Tenderloin & Lower Polk neighborhoods. For more information or to get a taste of Lord Frederick’s world, follow him on his Tik Tok, Instagram, or Twitter.

Phillip R. Ford, director of the cult film classic Vegas in Space (1991) and "honorary straight man" in the legendary San Francisco drag troupe Sluts A-Go-Go, presents a “stand up lecture with moving pictures” from his extensive “home movie” collection of performance documentation (& behind the scenes), including many scenes at the Tenderloin’s legendary Club 181!

Thursday June 29, 2023 | 5:30-7:30pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

In High Spots in a Low Dive: Doris Fish Home Movies 1981 to 1991, Ford presents a selection of greatest hits from his extensive “home movie” collection of videos from stage and TV performances together with many glimpses behind-the-scenes.  Live onstage he shares his stories and reminiscences, along with a fabulous assortment of video hits from San Francisco in the 1980s, a rather forgotten period of drag theater history.  Among the high spots are clips from Nightclub of the Living Dead, The Happy Hour Show, Bad Seed, Gay Cable Network and The Sluts A-Go-Go All Star Gang Bang and Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?.

Free/$10 Suggested Donation | Registration via Eventbrite

SEE & BE SCENE at Frameline47 June 14-24! Celebrate Pride all around San Francisco and Oakland with 11 days of 100+ queer films and spectacular parties. The Tenderloin Museum is a proud community partner of the featured film, Kokomo City.

Saturday, June 17, 2023 | 1 - 2:30pm

At the historic Castro Theatre!

429 Castro St. SF, CA 94114

Kokomo City is an electric portrait of the inner lives of four Black trans sex workers in America. The central quartet — Liyah Mitchell, Dominque Silver, Koko Da Doll, and Daniella Carter — narrate their own specific journeys navigating Blackness, sexuality, and gender while charting their own path to achieving their dreams for the future. Told with a candid vulnerability, their stories deliver unpredictable bouts of humor and raw humanity, packing the film with mile-a-minute insights into their everyday lives and undidactic observations on contemporary social constraints. Directed by D. Smith Running Time: 73 mins

Tickets $15.50 - $17.50

The Sunday Streets Tenderloin Community Block Party will transform Golden Gate Ave. into a car-free community space featuring free recreational activities, health resources, music, dance, and family-friendly fun. Tenderloin Museum will be tabling and presenting a “Sounds of the TL” live music program ft. The Four Fives.

Golden Gate Ave. (between Jones & Hyde streets)

Sunday June 4, 2023 | 12-5pm

Live musical performance by The Four Fives at 3pm

It’s the 15th year of Sunday Streets in San Francisco! Celebrate Tenderloin style on June 4th for a Community Block Party–from 12-5pm, Golden Gate Ave. between Jones & Hyde will be transformed into a car-free community space featuring fun, free activities provided by local nonprofits, community groups, and small businesses.

Tenderloin Museum will be tabling at the TL Community Block Party sharing neighborhood history, info about upcoming programs, and a “Sounds of the Tenderloin” musical performance by The Four Fives, the brainchild of artists Rasul Grayson and Chris Burch, aka Goya Goon, who’s resplendent 2021 mural “Jupiter Redding, returned, endowed with everything that this world denied them.” looks out over the intersection of Turk and Leavenworth in the heart of the TL. Influenced by inherently Black American genres that emerged when music media was limited to 33, 78, and 45 RPM vinyl playback, ‘The Four Fives’ infuse jazz, blues, soul, and hip hop in a way that re-envisions and redesigns the boundaries of hip-hop through poetry and storytelling, with testimony to the ever-evolving ode to Black radical imagination.

FREE!

Tenderloin Museum is honored to present highlights from The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play written by Donna Personna, Colette LeGrande, and Mark Nassar as part of the SF Pride 2023 Kick-Off: A Night of Queer Entertainment at the historic Castro Theatre.

Friday June 2, 2023 

Doors 6:30pm | Show at 7pm

At the historic Castro Theatre!

429 Castro St. SF, CA 94114

This opening event for Pride month is a fundraiser for the organization that makes Pride come to life each year in San Francisco. The evening will also feature screenings of the films "Mrs. Vera’s Daybook" and "The Girl From 7th Avenue", multi-disciplinary performances by up-and-coming local legends, DJs, dancers, raffles, and a convivial time to mark the start of Pride. Join us to support SF Pride, celebrate intergenerational liberation, as well as to hear a special announcement about the future of the play! That’s right, you’ll hear it first at the Castro!

Tickets via Eventbrite ($20 Suggested Donation)

Join us for an opening reception for the first solo exhibition by the Black, blind, gay, sexy artist Lord Frederick and experience his journey of passion, fashion, cartoons & illustrations. See what he remembers seeing; see what he sees now.

June 1, 2023 5:30-7:30pm

At the Tenderloin Museum

398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

With Memory of Sight, Lord Frederick invites attendees to “see what he remembers seeing, and to see what he sees now.” In a world increasingly dominated by visual culture, Lord Frederick upends the primacy of the visual, channeling his sensory understanding of the world to subvert commonly held assumptions about identity, race, and ability. Memory of Sight opens on June 1st, 2023 with an opening reception in conjunction with the monthly SF First Thursday Art Walk in the Tenderloin & Lower Polk neighborhoods; the artist will return on the first Thursday in July for an artist talk.

Free!

Celebrate the publication of Craig Seligman’s new book, Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, at the Tenderloin Museum with a reading and discussion about that legendary queen’s “Sluts-a-Go-Go” era performances and the 1980s scene at the archetypal TL nightclub, Club 181, ft. Seligman, Silvana Nova, Phillip R. Ford, & Janice Sukaitis.

Thursday May 4, 2023 | 6-7:30pm

at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Free (or $10 suggested donation) | Register via Eventbrite

NYC based journalist Craig Seligman’s new book, Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag (Public Affairs, 2023), chronicles the life and times of one of San Francisco’s most prominent and beloved drag queens of the 1980s. Doris Fish story includes a key chapter in the Tenderloin, in which Doris’s irreverent drag troupe the Sluts-a-Go-Go coheres around Naked Brunch, a campy and chaotic live theatrical soap opera, and her performance and writing chops become more fully realized. The venue: Club 181 on Eddy St., an archetypal Tenderloin dive that mixed glamor and grit in the district’s distinct tenor. Join us for a trip through Doris’ scene at the 181; Seligman will read from his new book, we’ll screen performance documentation of these “Sluts-a-Go-Go” shows , and then the author will be joined by a cadre of performers in the Sluts’ circle–-Silvana Nova, Janice Sukaitis, and Phillip R. Ford–to discuss Ms. Fish and this legendary Tenderloin nightclub. 

Time travel with us to experience the elaborate neon movie marquees that once saturated Market Street near San Francisco's Tenderloin.

Tuesday May 2, 2023 | 5:30pm - 7:30pmin-person at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

$10 Registration via Eventbrite

Between the 1930s–1960s, Market Street was home to a dense collection of cinemas between 5th and 10th Streets, with extravagant neon marquee and projecting signs. All but three of these movie theaters are now closed, and several of them were demolished; now it is a treasure hunt to discover these beautiful and mostly bygone neon signs where San Francisco's movie-lovers gathered from the near-by Tenderloin, Union Square shops, and beyond. Enter neon nirvana and spend an evening with Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan, founders of San Francisco Neon, with co-presenter Jim Van Buskirk, author of Celluloid San Francisco, to learn about Market Street’s rich history of neon on its many movie marquees!

Explore and celebrate the history of the labor movement in the TL with a presentation by Catherine Powell of the Labor Archives & Research Center at SFSU.

April 22, 2023 | 1-2:30pm

At the Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94122

Free! No registration required

Union halls, labor art and education, titanic battles with the city’s employers, and breaking down racial barriers all inform labor’s rich and fascinating historical record in the TL. Join us for a special Saturday afternoon program that explores and celebrates the history of the labor movement in the Tenderloin with Catherine Powell of the Labor Archives & Research Center (LARC) at SFSU. For “Labor in the ‘Loin,” Powell will survey the districts’ deep vein of labor history and connect this lineage to current local unions. We’ll look to the past to see the city from the unique point of view of those who have worked in its garment factories, labored in its hotels, and performed in SF's renowned symphony and jazz halls; we’ll also examine the present day labor scene, including the neighborhood is home to the city’s largest private sector union, UNITE HERE Local 2, as well as the country’s first union to receive government funds to counsel immigrant workers, SEIU Janitors’ Local 87.

The ‘We Are Home’ Tenderloin Community Quilt returns to the Tenderloin Museum for another open quilting workshop with Mattie Loyce. Join us Wednesday afternoon to share your notions of home & contribute a square! 

Wednesday April 5, 2023 | 4:30 - 6:00 pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St, San Francisco, CA 94102

FREE

The ‘We Are Home’ Tenderloin Community Quilt project is an art project focused on engaging the extended Tenderloin community in expressing the significance and meaning of ‘home’. Led by Mattie Loyce Community Development Manager from DISH (Delivering in Supportive Housing), from the fall/winter of 2022 – Spring 2023 the ‘We Are Home’ project will be hosting workshops throughout the Tenderloin where people can participate in creating individual quilt squares to contribute to what will be a greater Tenderloin Community Quilt completed by fall of 2023. The project will be amplifying the voices of people who have the lived experience of homelessness, and those that care for or live and work in community with unhoused neighbors.

Working class theater is powerful, fun and needed now more than ever. In this event, we will trace the lineage of activist workers’ theater in San Francisco from the California Labor School of the 1940’s to today’s Work Tales project. Our presentation will culminate with a performance by the janitor-actors of the Tenderloin based union, SEIU Local 87. They will share an excerpt of their work, Bread and Prosperity. The evening will be co-hosted by Bill Shields, director of Work Tales and Olga Miranda, President of Local 87.

Working Class Theater: from the California Labor School to Today

Thursday March 30, 2023 | 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

At the Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Free event!

Join us to learn about the history of working class theater in San Francisco and how it intersects with labor organizing today, especially among immigrant workers in the post pandemic era. Working Class Theater: from the California Labor School to Today is presented as part of Education for Action: California Labor School, 1942 - 1957, a special exhibit in collaboration with San Francisco State’s Labor Archives and public program series, and is inspired by the CLS arts curricula. The Labor Archives is a Work Tales partner.

Swallow THIS, a short documentary, shows how the pandemic liberated people who take methadone and the need to abolish the methadone clinic system. Film screening + directors Helen Redmond and Marilena Marchetti in-person.

Thursday March 23, 2023 | 7:30pm - 9pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

FREE

Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone and COVID-19  reveals what happened in methadone clinics during the pandemic. Federal agencies lifted rigid restrictions on take-home doses and everyone was eligible for 14 or 28 days of medication. No more standing in line six days a week to drink methadone. It was LIBERATION! 

Directors Marilena Marchetti & Helen Redmond traveled across the country to document the impact of this unprecedented change. In bracingly honest interviews with patients, clinic staff, and drug-user activists from Connecticut to Tennessee, the filmmakers found that the new take-homes policy was adopted inconsistently and then ended. 

Methadone clinics were created in the 1970s during the Nixon presidency and were designed to control, surveil, and punish patients. Now is the time to shut down these carceral facilities and allow methadone to be picked up at the pharmacy. It is time to free people who take methadone. 

Swallow THIS is a call to action to abolish methadone clinics.

After the screening, join the directors for a Q & A conversation. 

Runtime: 27min. View trailer here.  

Marchetti and Redmond's feature-length documentary is Liquid Handcuffs: A Documentary To Free Methadone.

ABC7 and Tenderloin Museum invite you to attend the community screening of ABC7 Originals documentary “Injecting Hope” on Thursday, March 23, 2023, followed by panel Q&A with ABC7 News reporter Tara Campbell and San Francisco leaders working to address the drug overdose crisis.  

Thursday, March 23, 2023 | Doors at 5:30pm Screening at 6pm

At the Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

FREE | Register via Eventbrite

The ABC7 Originals documentary “Injecting Hope” takes viewers onto the streets of Vancouver to see how safe consumption sites, sometimes called safe injection sites, are saving lives amid the worst drug overdose crisis North America has ever seen.

From the mayor's office to the alleys of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, ABC7 News reporter Tara Campbell meets those trying to solve the drug overdose crisis and those caught in addiction.

Following the screening, Campbell will moderate a panel featuring:

• Matt Dorsey, SF Supervisor

• Lydia Bransten, The Gubbio Project

• Ellen Grantz, Mothers Against Drug Addiction & Deaths

• Laura Thomas, SF AIDS Foundation    

• Hillary Ronen, SF Supervisor 

The event is free to attend. Doors at 5:30pm, screening & panel at 6pm. Learn more about the film at: https://abc7news.com/injecting-hope-safe-consumption-site-injection-vancouver-fentanyl/12665640/

Interdisciplinary historian Joseph Plaster shares a presentation about his recently published book, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Susan Stryker and featuring Cecilia Chung & Anthony Cabello.

Ft. author Joseph Plaster with Susan Stryker, Cecilia Chung, & Anthony Cabello

Thursday March 16, 2023 | 5:30pm - 7pm

At the Tenderloin Museum: 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Free with registration via Eventbrite ($10 suggested donation)

Tenderloin Museum welcomes Joseph Plaster for a talk and panel discussion in celebration of his recently published Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Duke University Press). Focused on San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the book explores informal social support and mutual aid networks amongst abandoned and runaway queer youth, and in doing so excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride. 

For this event at the Tenderloin Museum, Plaster is joined by two of the voices featured in his prior “Polk Street Stories” project--Cecilia Chung, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Evaluation at Transgender Law Center, and Anthony Cabello, who currently manages Palo Alto Hotel, a Polk St. SRO. Moderating this panel is Susan Stryker, co-director of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, the 2005 documentary that helped resurface the TL’s seminal act of queer resistance, and former executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, the archives at which were a critical source of Plaster’s research. 

SF Urban Film Festival presents a program centered around two recent films that explore how community artists assume the role of catalysts, organizers, and ministers and often involve neighbors and residents in transformational acts of creation. Curated by Robin Abad Ocubillo and John Brett.

Friday March 10, 2023 | 6pm - 8:30pm

In person at The Tenderloin Museum 

398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Register required via the SF Urban Film Festival’s program page

Rituals of communion, mourning, and celebration express the beating hearts of our communities. Often, community artists assume the role of catalysts, organizers, and ministers - involving neighbors and residents in transformational acts of creation. 

With “Communion and Wellbeing: Arts and Outreach,” the SF Urban Film Festival presents a program at the Tenderloin Museum centered around two recent films, Jeanne Marie Hallacy’s He Had Wings (USA, 2022, 29 min) & ABD/Skywatchers’ The Slow Art of Belonging (USA, 2022, 38 min), that feature Mission and Tenderloin artists whose work with locals has adorned those neighborhoods with murals and performances, inspiring collective action while ritualizing belonging and identity. 

After the screening, join us for a discussion with panelists responsible for impactful social ministry, health, and artistic creation in the Tenderloin and Mission neighborhoods. Featuring Rev. Dr. Glenda Hope, Founder and 40 years Director of SF Network Ministries, Celestina Pearl, LVN/Outreach Director St James Infirmary, Father Richard Smith, Chaplain, SF Night Ministry; moderated by program curators Robin Abad Ocubillo and John M. Brett. 

Learn more about the SF Urban Film Festival and explore its full 2023 program at https://sfurbanfilmfest.com/2023/.

San Francisco Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus and Freedom Songs Revival converge for a joint concert that shares the tradition of song in working class culture and surveys their local living canon of labor songs plus a program of civil rights music. 

Saturday, February 25, 2023 | 3pm - 4:30pm

At the Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Free!

Coming together in song is a primal act of solidarity. For those who work and organize workers, songs are powerful units of cultural transmission and tools for building labor movements. Whether from the folkways or on the picket lines, labor songs not only are integral parts of the working class culture that sustained robust union activity in the 19th & 20th centuries but also tell the history of that culture and usher it into the present. 

Tenderloin Museum welcomes the Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus and Freedom Songs Revival for a joint concert in celebration of Education for Action: California Labor School 1942-1957,TLM’s collaborative special exhibit with the Labor Archives at SFSU. Both of these labor choruses have deep roots in the Bay Area’s contemporary community of labor activists (as well as abundant overlap between their members & activities), and are uniquely suited to perform in an homage, continuation, and extension of the choral and labor song traditions practiced by CLS.

Treasured SF drag performer, educator, and artist Per Sia returns to the Tenderloin Museum for a Drag Story Hour at which she will use drag to read books that explore the themes of work and solidarity, subjects of TLM’s special exhibit about the California Labor School.

Saturday, February 25, 2023 | 11am - 12pm

At the Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Free!

Drag Story Hour is Education for Action! The beloved program (originated in 2015 in SF!) features storytellers using the art of drag to read books to kids in libraries, schools, bookstores, and in this case the Tenderloin Museum! For this particular story hour, Per Sia selects titles that explore the connections between labor organizing, working class culture and drag performance, inspired by TLM’s current special exhibit Education for Action: California Labor School 1942 - 1957. Set against the backdrop of Legends of San Francisco, a photo and floral show celebrating elder queens, this special Drag Story Hour echoes the intergenerational exchange at the heart of the Legends of Drag project and its current exhibit in the TLM gallery.

Please join us for an open quilting workshop and contribute to the ‘We Are Home’ Tenderloin Community Quilt.

Thursday January 19, 2023 | 3:30 - 5:00pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St, San Francisco, CA 94102

FREE

The ‘We Are Home’ Tenderloin Community Quilt project is an art project focused on engaging the extended Tenderloin community in expressing the significance and meaning of ‘home’. Led by Mattie Loyce Community Development Manager from DISH (Delivering in Supportive Housing), from the fall/winter of 2022 – Spring 2023 the ‘We Are Home’ project will be hosting workshops throughout the Tenderloin where people can participate in creating individual quilt squares to contribute to what will be a greater Tenderloin Community Quilt completed by fall of 2023. The project will be amplifying the voices of people who have the lived experience of homelessness, and those that care for or live and work in community with unhoused neighbors.

Celebrate the opening of Legends of San Francisco, an exhibition of photos and florals celebrating the local drag queen elders featured in Legends of Drag: Queens of a Certain Age, with a party and drag show of legendary stature! Featuring performances by Donna Personna, Collette LeGrande, Olivia Hart, Carla Gay, Renita Valdez, & BeBe Sweetbriar, Joan Jett Blakk, plus MCs Juanita More & Sister Roma!

Thursday January 12, 2023 | 5:30-8pm

At the Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

FREE

Inspired by a revelatory night at Aunt Charlie’s, artists Harry James Hanson, Devin Antheus, and Deb Leal began the project in the spring of 2018. It has grown to include 81 queens in 16 cities. Those portraits and accompanying stories from drag queen elders were published as Legends of Drag: Queens of A Certain Age in May 2022, from Abrams Books. Legends of San Francisco spotlights our local models, in the city where it all began. Knowing all of the queens involved, rest assured this opening reception will be the stuff of legends!

Inspired by the “People’s Songs Branch” gatherings at the California Labor School, San Francisco’s radical workers’ school with roots in the TL, Tenderloin Museum presents an inclusive group sing-a-long exploring labor songs, work songs, and more. 

Thursday January 5, 2023 | 5:30-7:30pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St, San Francisco, CA 94102

FREE

To celebrate the opening of the special exhibit Education for Action: California Labor School, 1942 - 1957 (in collaboration with The Labor Archives and Research Center), Tenderloin Museum is hosting a sing-a-long in lieu of a reception so as to capture the participatory & inquisitive spirit of CLS, explore a wide-open repertoire with of labor songs, and gather with the purpose of singing together. 

This event will utilize the In Song Sing On songbook, an ever growing collection of well loved and newly loved songs selected by a wide cast of contributors and compiled by artists David Wilson and Colter Jacobsen. Books will be passed around with lyrics, some guitar strummers will help hold the tune, and we will open up our voices toward one another. For this iteration of In Song Sing On, Wilson will be joined by fellow interdisciplinary artist Raphael Villet & will focus on labor songs and songs about work. All are welcome and encouraged to sing and to bring a song to share!