Trolls & Potholes, Rik Lee Leipold

Exhibition Run: May 15, 2021 - July 3, 2021

Trolls & Potholes, Rik Lee Leipold’s gallery show at the Tenderloin Museum, surveys the street artist’s five-year-long practice of filling potholes and cracks in Tenderloin sidewalks with resin and found objects, commemorating queer spaces and memories through tiny but evocative acts of reverse urban archaeology, (re)incorporating Tenderloin history into the built environment. In addition to their utilitarian purpose of “fixing” potholes, Leipold’s installations are at once poignant and whimsical, drawing perceptive passersby into engrossing microcosms of the neighborhood and its many overlapping communities. Their Tenderloin Museum show turns this concept inside out, framing the neighborhood in an overview of the artist’s dozens of pothole installations via a wall-sized steel-cut map and a collection of takeaway postcards that highlight specific works; the postcards can serve as a guide on a pilgrimage around the neighborhood to visit each resin in site. 

For many of the site-specific pothole installations created for their on-going “Resin in Pavement” project, Leipold collaborated with fellow Tenderloin artists to collect personal effects, bric-a-brac, and ephemera and enshrining the objects in a translucent pool of resin, suspending the emblematic items directly into the streetscape. Each work is an experiment in materiality: screws, googly eyes, sloganeering pins, glitter, candy, rainbows and more enmesh a Tenderloin artists’ story into the sidewalk. Some of the most recent in this series feature graphic novelist and City College fashion instructor Diego Gomez and transgender activist, drag performer, and frequent Tenderloin Museum collaborator Donna Personna. Other installations featured in Trolls & Potholes mark queer spaces at the sites of former gay bars the Gangway and Deco Lounge. The set of 10 postcards that Leipold has printed for the show note the location of each work, as well as a series of “time-capsule” benches that Leipold made for the grand reopening of Srgt. John Macaulay Park. Trolls & Potholes is on view at the Tenderloin Museum from May 15 - July 3; come pick up a postcard map from the museum and tour the neighborhood by visiting all of Rik Lee Leipold pothole installations yourself.