San Francisco - Arts & Culture

Former Blue Lamp bartender and author Rachel Kushner will headline a virtual event this week to remember the storied Tenderloin dive known for its live music.

Castro residents and visitors out for a Sunday stroll will have the opportunity to view panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at two locations around the neighborhood this weekend.

The beautifully restored and boozy movie theater will bring back the light, camera, and action in July, though no specific dates or films have been announced.

While San Francisco's Pride parade will again not take place this year, the traditional Pink Triangle atop Twin Peaks will again be lit up like a giant gay beacon, this time throughout Pride Month.

A three-day Godzillafest welcomes audiences back into the Balboa Theater on Friday, May 14, but only at 50% capacity.

Every Sunday through the end of June, a block off Noe and Market streets transforms into an outdoor art market, where passersby can purchase anything from potted succulents to psychedelic portraits from participating vendors.

An hour-long virtual show next week “showcases the LGBTQ+ culture of Chinatown” with drag shows, cocktail demos, and the neighborhood’s untold queer stories.

Vintage Sutro Baths bathing suits are already fetching more than $1,000, and the autographed movie star photos go on sale Friday.

After several years of planning, legacy bookstore The Booksmith is moving to its third home later this spring. The new location is just down the block on Haight Street in a building the business already leased for an event-focused space called The Bindery.

A local group of history buffs and conservators is hoping that the collection — at least some of it — can remain together and available for public view, even after the Cliff House potentially becomes a different restaurant.

Shelter in place won’t block a youth-led tour group from giving Chinatown tours, as they’ve rebuilt the neighborhood in the virtual world of Minecraft.

Legendary North Beach poet, publisher, and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has died. He was 101 years of age. The beloved literary icon died peacefully in his San Francisco home surrounded by loved ones, "holding the hands of his son and his son’s girlfriend, 'as he took his last breath,'" his son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti said on Tuesday.

The temporary COVID-19 mural magic of the Paint the Void project comes to Chinatown in time for the Lunar New Year feasts, as three restaurant parklets get rejuvenating murals.

West Portal's beloved arthouse cinema, CineArts at Empire (85 West Portal Ave.), is closing for good due to the pandemic, though the city says it is working to find a new operator for the theater.

After rocking the nation’s world at the Biden inauguration, poet laureate Amanda Gorman now has a mural homage at the Hayes Valley SF Zen Center.

Renovations to the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McLaren Park are underway to make the site more accessible and improve facilities for concert performers and attendees alike.

While you can’t go to hot tub parties in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival this year, the flicks are coming to SF as Fort Mason will be a ‘satellite’ site for the 2021 festival.

A pair of cherry blossom trees outside the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco's Japantown won't be blooming this year after a vandal or vandals went to great efforts to rip all the branches off of them.

A TV pilot Bruce Lee wrote in 1971 is now a big-budget TV series set in 1870s San Francisco Chinatown, and it’s streaming now on HBO Max.

Longtime Western Addition resident and gay-Latino designer Miguel Gutierrez was recently profiled in a new documentary film about his life in San Francisco, and his art, design, and costume creations. The film was released last week in commemoration of World AIDS Day on December 1.

In the Portola, this month signifies not just the end of an eventful year but the close of the Multi-Mural Community Art Project, a two-year effort that has culminated in three new murals along San Bruno Avenue. 

The landmark Hallidie Building (130 Sutter St.) is getting a new ground-floor tenant next year, and it's the professional organization for architects that has long occupied some offices on an upper floor of the building.

Work will be slightly less scarce for 30 underemployed artists and performers in the coronavirus economy, as a new San Francisco Creative Corps will be giving the gift of gigs.

Fitting in a year where public art and physically distant activities are the new norm, a Sunnyside neighborhood group is calling for art enthusiasts to participate in its 2020 Socially Distanced Drawing Contest, which begins this Sunday, November 22.

Over the weekend, three-year-old Castro art gallery Art Attack SF (2358 Market St.) announced it would be closing its doors for the foreseeable future.