A poetry reading hosted by author and songwriter Kimi Sugioka.

Author and songwriter Kimi Sugioka is a mesmerizing—and folkloric—figure in the Bay Area literary community. She is described as maternal, witchy, and passionate by Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism. For decades, Sugioka has been involved in the Bay Area’s literary community, and was a former curator of the legendary Café Babar poetry series of the 1990s. Now, Sugioka says, poetry readings are more significant than ever in a shifting San Francisco: “the [literary] community subsists on artistic freedom—and it is still free. There are multiple poetry readings every night and they don’t cost anything. They cut across class, race and culture, and engender the expression of diverse voices that share the paradoxical wit, wisdom, terror and joy of our times."

On December 17, the Tenderloin Museum will have the privilege of hosting the book launch for Wile & Wing, Sugioka’s latest series of poems which explore themes of Invisible borders, personal boundaries, and social justice. In classic “Babarian” fashion, Sugioka will also be joined by authors Natasha Dennerstein and Susan Dambroff, where they will each read book excerpts and original poems.

About the poets:

Kimi Sugioka

Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, California, Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She performs her work frequently throughout the Bay Area. She has worked in public education for decades, and earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Natasha Dennerstein

Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat.

Susan Dambroff

Susan Dambroff is a poet, performer, and teacher drawn to the detailed placement of words and the alchemy of timing and sequence. She has published the chapbook,“Conversations with Trees.”

A one-year anniversary celebration of The Match Book, which includes an evening walking tour from the Tenderloin to Union Square.

Join us for an evening tour through San Francisco’s historic corridors between the Tenderloin and Union Square. This is a brand new tour as a follow-up to last year’s Tenderloin Matchbook-Neon tour. Randall Homan and Al Barna from San Francisco Neon and Katie Conry from the Tenderloin Museum will lead a walking exploration of Tenderloin matchbooks associated with legacy businesses and neon signs. Just like matchbooks, historic neon signs are a fascinating synecdoche of the small businesses they represent, and a window to the past explored through material culture.

The tour features forgotten storefronts that are remembered vividly through vintage matchbooks. As twilight falls, the tour flows past a vivid collection of neon signs that serve as advertising and illuminated local landmarks.

Preceding the tour, patrons will have the opportunity to appreciate the art of the match book every day: in honor of its one-year anniversary, copies of the Tenderloin Museum's book, The Match Book, which resurrects the Tenderloin’s overlooked history of restaurants, bars, hotels and other business establishments through these daily objects, will be signed and made available for purchase —just in time for the holidays.

Tour starts with a brief orientation about the Match Book project at the Tenderloin Museum and ends at Union Square. Book early, space is limited.

Proudly in partnership with San Francisco Neon.

Doors: 6 p.m.

Book signing reception: 6 - 6:30 p.m.

Tour: 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Elliot Bamberger wants you to look twice at San Francisco.

To Bamberger, a San Francisco native, the city’s small businesses are less like old buildings and more like odd characters. Described as portraits, the neon-lit bars, liquor stores, and laundromats that Bamberger focuses on in his photographic series, Neon Monuments: The Bars, Businesses, and One-Stop Shops That Shape the Tenderloin, are charming—and enduring—testaments to classic ideas surrounding opportunity, enterprise, and resilience.

Evoking endearing, personal qualities that are more closely associated with individuals rather than architecture, Bamberger believes that the Tenderloin’s mom-and-pop shops are what unify the area’s motley, immigrant-heavy community. “If there was just a bunch of conglomerates and chains, [San Francisco] would definitely feel like most other cities in the country,” says Bamberger. “Rather than just treat [San Francisco] like a utility, think of it as more of a character or experience.”

But in the commuter era, how do you look at a city for what it is, rather than what it provides? And in this age of uber-convenience, will these small businesses survive? Featuring photographs of bars, liquor stores, and laundromats, Bamberger’s latest exhibition, Neon Monuments: The Bars, Businesses, and One-Stop Shops That Shape the Tenderloin, pays homage to the familial businesses that make San Francisco unique—and urges viewers to engage with San Francisco’s diverse, urban landscape.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, December 5.
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About the artist:

Elliot Bamberger is an LA-based, SF-born portrait artist who gets his influence and inspiration from exploring San Francisco, as well as spending time at its many vista points. Over the past seven years, Elliot has created portraits of places all over San Francisco with an emphasis on architecture, geology and culture.

If there’s anything that the queens of High Fantasy actively challenge and explore, it’s the notion of drag: What is it? Who is it for? And how does it apply to queer identity?

On November 21, join us for the closing reception of There Will Always be Roses in San Francisco, California-based photographer Marissa Leitman’s latest exhibition on High Fantasy, the iconoclastic, experimental drag series which took place at Aunt Charlies from 2010-2018.

Featuring the beloved subjects of There Will Always be Roses in San Francisco, Myles Cooper, Mandy Coco, Kyle DeMedio, Brittany Newell, Fiera Morena, and Marissa Patrice Leitman will discuss topics on how High Fantasy began, how Aunt Charlie’s interacts with the Tenderloin, drag’s relationship with queerness, and what it means to be a part of a community.

Doors: 6 p.m.
Panel: 6:30 p.m.
Reception: 7:30 p.m.
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This event is part of a larger series of events and exhibitions 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, 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. 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.

A cocktail social, slide presentation, and film screening which highlights Cold War-era neon signs in Warsaw, Cuba, and San Francisco.

According to Al Barna of San Francisco Neon, the Castro Theater losing its neon sign would be like the city block losing its two front teeth.  

“[The Castro Theater’s neon sign] is a landmark for the neighborhood, for the gay community, for the film community, and for social justice. Neon soaks up meaning and history, and makes a statement just by staying there and lighting up every night,” says Randall Ann Homan, co-founder of SF Neon with her husband, Al Barna. To Homan and Barna, neon signs are not just pieces of colored glass: they are sculpted artforms, cultural landmarks, and symbols of survival.

In places like mid-century Warsaw, Havana, and San Francisco, neon signs brought light, color, and aesthetics to dense metropolitan spaces—from the 1930s to the 1950s, Havana once had 140 neon-lit cinemas on Calle 23, the Cuban equivalent of Broadway. The Tenderloin, too, has an abundance of nearly 100 vintage neon signs, the highest concentration of neighborhood neon in San Francisco. 

However, despite the divergent histories of each of these cities, mid-century neon served similar functions: they marked where people gathered, advertising goods, services and social spaces. And despite that much neon was lost in the wake of modernization and development, all three cities are experiencing neon restoration efforts by individuals and preservation organizations.

On November 14, the Tenderloin Museum will host a series of slide presentations and discussions which explore neon’s various forms and functions in Warsaw, Havana, and San Francisco. Featuring slides of Cuban neon from Tenderloin Museum Executive Director Katie Conry’s and Steven Spiegel of Signs United’s recent trips to Havana, audience members will have the opportunity to get an inside look at how vintage neon signs are surviving today. Preceding the slide presentations, SF Neon will give an overview of the current projects to restore vintage neon in San Francisco. 

Lastly, following the slide presentations will be a screening of NEON, Eric Bednarski’s award-winning documentary on the neonization of Warsaw and Poland in the Cold War era. In this gorgeous film, Bednarski uncovers the remarkable Polish neon design of 1960s and 1970s in Warsaw, and asks: Was it possible to truly advertise in a system where shops were frequently empty and brands and services were state run? What distinguished “socialist” neon advertising from neon advertising on the other side of the Iron Curtain? 

Doors: 6 p.m.
Cocktail social: 6:30 - 7 p.m. (featuring a special neon cocktail)
Slide presentations: 7 p.m.
Screening: 8 p.m.
Q&A session: 8:55 p.m. 

Buy tickets here
RSVP here

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This program is in partnership with Tenderloin Neon A-Z, a collaboration between the Tenderloin Museum, SF Neon, and San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) to restore neon signs in the Tenderloin neighborhood in an effort to illuminate this historic neighborhood.

Cover photo by Steven Spiegel of Signs United.

The performances may have stopped, but the party still isn’t over.

Thursday, November 7: For the next SF First Thursdays: Lower Polk / TL Art Walk, stay late at the Tenderloin Museum for an after-hours viewing of Marissa Leitman's latest exhibition, There Will Always be Roses in San Francisco, which pays homage to High Fantasy—an evening of drag nouveau which took place for eight years at the legendary Aunt Charlie's Lounge.

Saturday, October 26: visit the Tenderloin Museum for a free performance of The Chinese Lady, the intrepid play production which tells the tale of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese immigrant who came to America—and was subsequently brought to a zoo to promote the idea of the "exotic East."

Both historically significant and aesthetically compelling, The Chinese Lady has been highlighted by SF Weekly, The New York Times, and more.

Proudly in partnership with the Magic Theatre.