‘A Creator’s Dream’: Inside the SF Studio Building a Hub for Low-Income Artists

When the artist SupremeRivi11 first came across Hospitality House’s Community Arts Program on Market and Sixth streets in San Francisco, he felt like he’d discovered a gold mine. The fine art studio, tucked behind two street-level gallery spaces, offers low-income and homeless creatives workshops in printmaking, ceramics, and painting. Supplies are given freely. Staff and volunteers help coordinate exhibitions. If a piece sells, 100% of the profits go to the artist. 

“This is a creator’s dream,” says Rivi, an Iraq War veteran. “You can do everything in here: silk screen, paint, sew, you can make ceramics. I needed a place to be inspired, and it’s really hard to find a paint studio in the Bay Area.” 

Last week, Rivi’s hard work paid off. He opened a solo show with more than a dozen paintings on display in the studio’s gallery window, ranging from oil paints on linen to graphite sketches to silkscreens. 

Rivi is one of thousands of artists who’ve shown their work in the gallery over the last 15 years. Now, thousands more will have the chance to show their art, too. This month, Hospitality House, a Tenderloin-based homelessness nonprofit, announced it had purchased 1009 Market St., where its 56-year-old Community Arts Program has operated since 2010. In a time of great national economic insecurity, a rise in anti-homelessness sentiment in San Francisco, and an affordability crisis that has pushed many artists out of the city, this acquisition is a huge, increasingly rare win for both the arts and homeless communities. 

“The purchase represents a permanent home for community arts and for community artists,” says Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, describing the sale as “a dream come true.” 

The acquisition was a long time coming. Even though the building was owned by the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, an art-centered real estate organization, raising funds to complete the sale took years. Hospitality House launched a capital campaign called ‘Home Is Where the Art Is,’ which raised an impressive $800,000 — but it wasn’t enough. The San Francisco Foundation loaned the organization $1.5 million through its Bay Area Community Impact Fund to complete the $2.4 million sale, which went through in August.  

Now, there’s room for the program to grow. The two floors above the street-level art studio have high ceilings, beautiful light, and stunning historic features, like old metal staircases. Hospitality House staff are weighing their options here — they may expand the workshop and gallery into the upper floors, or take in a tenant to help pay the bills, or both. But now, at least, they can operate from a place of abundance, with the security that their program isn’t going anywhere. 

The works in Rivi’s show span decades. As a visitor walks up to the building, a huge abstract painting on the far wall of the window gallery will likely catch their eye. Breaking Point is bold, colorful, and dramatic, but it also has a good story.

Rivi carried the painting all over the country across the last decade, visiting people with whom he served in the war. At each house he’d unroll the Belgian linen canvas, talk to his friends about their experiences during and after their deployment, and paint their stories into the piece. It took him eight years to finish the painting.

“It was really to show them that we shouldn't be afraid of our past. We’ve gotta embrace it, because we went to this war, and we came back, and a lot of us have issues. But it doesn’t mean that we’re stuck,” he says. “I was moving around, I was visiting this brother, I was visiting this sister, I was bringing artwork and creating it. They got a lot out of it and that was the whole point. It's more so for them than it is for me.”

Much like the painting, there’s more to the studio space than meets the eye. The Community Arts Program offers tea and snacks to the people who walk through its doors — but also case managers, friends, and teachers. For low-income artists who may spend most of their waking hours trying to make ends meet, there’s the opportunity to center themselves, reach in deep, and find a way to express what is happening on any given day. 

Rivi says that support means everything. The studio has offered him more than supplies; he’s found community, too. “We all try to work together,” he says. “Even though we’re working individually, we all ask, ‘What do you think about this? How does this look?’ We just give honest opinions. It’s a really, really great space.”

And when artists get the opportunity to show their work, something magical happens. 

“When our artists see their artwork hanging, their face just lights up,” says Samson Manalo, development director for Hospitality House. “They can’t believe that people are purchasing their artwork. It’s wonderful to see that part of it. It's a really big self-esteem builder and also gives them hope.” 

The studio provides an opportunity, in other words, for artists to see themselves in a new light — sometimes quite literally, through work they may not find in a traditional gallery.

On the other side of the window from Rivi’s Breaking Point hangs a very different piece: Erica L. Chisolm Goddess #2. Surrounded by an ornate gold frame, the oil painting features a woman sitting atop a polar bear. It’s beautiful and timeless. 

“In galleries that I go to, there’s not a lot of representation of people of color that are in classically painted paintings,” says Rivi. It bothered him. “It’s like a thorn in my heel. I’m making classical paintings with beautiful people of color in them, and not just with browns. Our skin might be a hue of brown but there are green undertones, red undertones, yellow undertones, purple undertones. We’re so complex in our complexion. I want people to paint that way.” 

There are so many artistic mediums in Rivi’s show that it’s hard to conceive of it all coming from the same artist. There are pieces blending house paint, acrylic, graphite, indian ink. He’s always working on something, trying to hone new skills. 

“What’s the point of tapping into a style if you’re not gonna give it its just dues and try to master it?” he asks. “As an artist, I know I’m never going to be satisfied, because there is no end to this. That’s the beauty in it.”