Hear Me Out: Deirdre Weinberg Residency Showcase

Exhibition Run: July 8 - August 28

Street artist and long time artist in residence at the Tenderloin Museum Deirdre Weinberg returns to the TLM gallery for Hear Me Out, a Residency Showcase, on view July 8 - August 28, that surveys her prolific portraiture in the TL and spotlights the social encounters and subsequent dialogues borne from the artist’s intimate, in-situ portrait practice. 

LISTEN TO THE “HEAR ME OUT” AUDIO PROFILES HERE

Ever since she was first tapped by Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s (THC) Art Wraps program to paint some of the Tenderloin’s garbage cans in 2017, Weinberg has been painting quick sketches of the neighborhood’s denizens on repurposed cardboard canvases. Although a seasoned muralist, Weinberg quickly turned her focus to portraiture as a core component of her practice in the Tenderloin, and that work was first memorialized in her 2018 TLM gallery show, Living Memory in the TL. While her inaugural exhibition was rooted in witnessing and grasping at impermanence, Weinberg’s Residency Showcase expands on those themes by foregrounding the conversations that unfold while Tenderloin neighbors sit for their portraits. 

As artist in residence, Weinberg continued making portraits throughout 2019 and 2020, hosting multiple sessions at the Tenderloin Museum where she would paint Tenderloin locals and gift the mini-portraits to her subjects. In the 20-30 minutes it took to make a painting, conversation flowed naturally, and while the small talk was sometimes pedestrian, sometimes profound, Weinberg came to understand her portrait work as giving time and space to Tenderloin folks who struggle day to day with hardships. 

Documenting over three years of work, the gallery component of Hear Me Out features dozens of Weinberg’s small acrylic on cardboard portraits, a who’s who of the Tenderloin rendered in Weinberg’s gentle realism and dusky color palette, as well as several larger scale portraits painted onto salvaged doors. The doors are, of course, a synecdoche for “home”–--shelter and a place of one’s own, a should-be essential that many Tenderloin denizens are without or are in danger of losing. The doors are also a symbol for the worlds that opened up during the conversations between artist and subject. Dialogue often traversed typical points of social division (race, gender, class, etc.), and Weinberg recognized these exchanges opened a door to connect on a human level and celebrate diversity and commonalities.

Originally planned for 2020, Hear Me Out was delayed due to the pandemic, which impacted the Tenderloin in especially visceral and visible ways that underscored the precarious and fragile situations of our city’s most vulnerable communities. Throughout the pandemic, Weinberg continued making portraits in the TL, often during “Play Streets,” when busy blocks were closed to traffic and families could stretch out and safely distance in the increased open space, a vital refuge from living in San Francisco’s most dense residential neighborhood. Thus, most of Weinberg’s pandemic-era portraits featured young children and their parents, a contrast to her many portraits of SRO residents and their unhoused neighbors. Many were given to their subjects as tokens of affirmation and to cheer up kids Zoomed out and cooped up in tiny Tenderloin apartments. Weinberg dutifully documented all of these works, however, photographing each piece with its subject, and recording stories and banter as people sat for their portrait.