The Tenderloin Museum Art Gallery bridges the history of one of San Francisco's oldest neighborhoods with the culture of today. In collaboration with local artists, the Tenderloin Museum highlights the neighborhood's current status as a creative center of San Francisco. Coming up next in the TLM Gallery:

Finding Our Way Home: Mary TallMountain in the Tenderloin

An exhibition celebrating the life, work, and words of an essential Tenderloin voice.

On view 4/2/26-5/30/26

Opening Reception on 4/2/26 | 5-8pm (talk/screening at 6pm)

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

A new exhibit at TLM celebrates longtime Tenderloin resident and Native Alaskan (Koyukon Athabaskan) poet Mary TallMountain (1918-1994). Her extraordinary personal journey of recovery, writing, and cultural reclamation is told through key poems, rare photos, and video performances, with special emphasis on her community writing practice in the TL and how her legacy endures and inspires from SF to the Yukon. 

Mary TallMountain was Koyukon Athabaskan, born in Nulato, Alaska along the Yukon River in 1918. When her mother contracted tuberculosis and became too sick to care for her, Mary was adopted by the white village doctor and his wife, who took Mary “Outside” in 1924 when she was just six years old. She didn’t return home to Nulato for more than 50 years, but the whole trajectory of her life and her writing was aimed toward remembering and reclaiming her lost family, her lost home.

Much of her 50 years “Outside” was spent living in San Francisco's Tenderloin, where a tumultuous youth was healed through a communion with her place and community. In the TL, she found a home away from home. Here, she recovered from an addiction to alcohol, established her community-focused writing practice, and became a powerful voice for urban indigenous experience. She is remembered fondly in the TL for her dedication to her neighbors and advocacy for the marginalized and misunderstood to be seen and heard, most notably through her work with the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center’s Women’s Writing Workshop.

Organized in collaboration with TallMountain’s literary executor, friend, and fellow poet Kitty Costello, this exhibit tells her incredible life story, sharing her biography interpolated with select notable poems and performances, with a particular focus on how Mary made a home for herself in the Tenderloin, how the neighborhood affected her, and how she shaped it in return. 

The exhibit reflects a broader renaissance around TallMountain’s life and poetry locally as well as in her homeland of the Alaskan Interior. In 2024, a new play about TallMountain called Coming Home by playwright and Alaska Writer Laureate Emerita Anne Hanley brought the poet’s story and work to life through performances by Native Alaskan readers, including in her hometown of Nulato. That same year in San Francisco, the Mary TallMountain Award for literary excellence and community engagement was revived and given to Hanley, KPOO-FM mainstay Mary Jean Robertson (of “Webworks: Voices of the Native Nations” fame), and beloved Tenderloin poet Jesse James Johnson.

Opening at the start of National Poetry Month, TLM’s TallMountain exhibit coincides with the launch of the Mary TallMountain Project by Denakkanaaga, an organization that serves as the voice for Native elders of Interior Alaska. They have just launched a  new TallMountain webpage that shares her legacy, with video performances of the Coming Home play, a downloadable script to perform it anywhere, and many other resources. In chorus with this recent TallMountain revival in Alaska, the Tenderloin Museum seeks to manifest TallMountain’s life and work once again in the heart of the neighborhood that was so much a part of her life, sharing her legacy with old friends and a new generation of readers, writers, and community advocates. 

Public Programs:

4/2/26 6-8pm Opening Reception features a talk by TallMountain’s literary executor, friend, and fellow poet Kitty Costello + a video presentation of Coming Home, a new play about TallMountain’s life 

4/9/26 5-8pm An evening of poetry celebrating TallMountain for the 2nd Thursdays at Dodge Alley block party, featuring Kim Shuck, Kitty Costello, Charles Curtis Blackwell, Nazelah Jameson, and more TBA!

5/28/26 6-8pm A writing workshop with poet and educator Kitty Costello, using Mary TallMountain’s poetry and life as inspiration for reflecting on our own stories.