On View: 11/3/22 – 1/7/23

Thursday November 3, 2022
5:30 – 7:30 pm
Eamon McGivern & Leila Weefer in conversation at 6 pm
FREE event | Tenderloin Museum 398 Eddy St.
This solo exhibition at the Tenderloin Museum renders the quiet beauty and dignity of trans life over seven canvases, each shimmering with the nuance and tenderness of its subjects.

Funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission, McGivern’s Still Lives were created for exhibition in the Tenderloin, a district in which the presence of a trans community was recorded as early as the 1920s, and which is now home to the nation’s first Transgender Cultural District. Here is what the artist has to say about their trans portrait project:

“The people in these paintings are my friends and community members. You might recognize a friend as well, or your hairdresser, barista, tattoo artist, coworker or the person sitting next to you on BART. The paintings are exhibited a few blocks away from the site of Compton’s Cafeteria where, three years before Stonewall, transgender women and gender nonconforming people fought back against discrimination and police violence. The Tenderloin is still home to many trans people, and the trans community in San Francisco has continued to grow in spite of all the hardships that face us. But transphobia is also growing: 2022 has been a high-water mark in anti-trans legislation so far, and the Christo-fascist far right has become increasingly focused on our community. This series of paintings was initially intended as a testament to trans joy and the joy of trans community. Looking at the finished work, it feels more like a collection of ordinary people living our lives under a regime that, when it allows us to live at all, works to exclude us from public life. Perhaps it is both, and more besides.”

McGivern will discuss their work with one of the portrait subjects: Oakland based artist, writer, & curator Leila Weefur.

The opening will be part of the SF First Thursday Art Walk in the Lower Polk & Tenderloin neighborhoods.