Tender Life by Holly Coley

Exhibition Run: December 7, 2017 - January 30, 2018

Tenderloin Museum is pleased to present Tender Life: Graphic and Ceramic Memories of Tenderloin Living, 1999 - 2004, by Holly Coley. Coley is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, and ceramics with deep roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Tender Life, she explores on the mythology of the Tenderloin, inspired by her five year living in an apartment on Turk and Hyde. 

Through a collection of graphic panels and ceramic vessels, Coley reflects on the unforgettable characters and dive bars of yore through her playful visual vocabulary. The comics emphasize Coley’s narrative abilities, while the ceramics engage with collective consciousness and memory through everyday, functional items. 

Holly Coley lives and works in San Francisco. Her work focuses on the relationship between animals and humans, invented mythologies, Japanese ghost stories, nonfiction comics and her constant exploration of new materials. She works primarily in water based/mixed media painting  and ceramics. A celebrated teaching artist, Coley instructs ceramics at Pinckney Clay in the Mission and several SF public schools, plus she leads graphic novel workshops at San Francisco Community College and Root Division. She studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and SF State.