Opening March 12 2021 “Yours Truly” the first group art exhibition by residents of the DISH Hotels and Tenderloin Community. Blossoming from the historic year of 2020 the exhibition will focus on themes of hope, strength, and resilience by resident/artists of The LeNain, Empress and Windsor Hotels. The group exhibition will include 30 resident artists as well as a community ‘Hope Quilt’ that staff and residents will work together to create. Organised and curated by Engage Program Director Mattie Loyce, the exhibition will give an opportunity for the residents to send a message to the world about who they are – the art they make - and share a reflection of what is going on within their world, community, and experience.

The Hope Quilt is a social artwork made with contributions from DISH hotel residents and staff and constructed with support of community arts organisation Mission Praxis. The quilt is comprised of squares that residents designed envisioning what hope means to them. This Hope Quilt is building from other radical quilting traditions like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which started in San Francisco, and Gee’s Bend Quilts from a southern African-American community. In this historic time, through the experience of pandemic and social uprisings, we thought it was important to explore this theme of hope with the frontline Tenderloin community.

The exhibition will run for 3 weeks at SWIM Gallery in the Tenderloin on Ellis and Leavenworth. The mission of SWIM Gallery is to provide a space for emerging and established artists to showcase their work in a way that will foster the growth of their artistic careers.

This awesome project will be the first of its kind for the DISH, running for the past 17 years supporting people of the Tenderloin, and it will be a spark of wonderful light within the community! We have 3 different Tenderloin based organisations collaborating, along with a community arts project from the mission district Mission Praxis.