When Oasis nightclub owner D’Arcy Drollinger decided to cover the walls of his venue at 11th Street and Burns Place with a 2,500-square-foot mural honoring the South of Market area’s history of drag and fetish culture, he wanted the superstars of San Francisco’s奇怪的艺术commanding the paintbrushes.
“I knew their different, distinct styles would work together, like a puzzle,” Drollinger said. “Seeing it come together, I’ve loved the overlap where images and words are becoming layered and even on top of each other. I think that shows how cohesively they’ve all worked with each other.”
是San Francisco’s art scene having a queer renaissance?
The mural, titled “Showtime,” is the combined visions of San Francisco artists Serge Gay Jr., Elliott C. Nathan, J Manuel Carmona, Simón Malvaez and Christopher McCutcheon, and it depicts a variety of tropes and symbols associated with the queer nightlife community in which Drollinger is a fixture. From high heels to makeup mirrors and spotlights, juxtaposed by the name of the club, the mural’s title and words like “boys, girls, thems,” “night club,” “drag show” and “playland” all aim to inform any passerby who doesn’t already know that Oasis is a queer space.
Portraits of late drag artists including Bambi Lake, Phatima Rude, Tippi, José Sarria and Felicia Flames are also a major feature of the work, prompted by a desire to commemorate significant members of the SoMa nightlife community.
The only living drag queen on the mural — not surprisingly — is Drollinger.
“If we included living performers other than me, I was afraid we’d get questions about why certain people were or were not chosen,” explained Drollinger. “I figured no one is going to argue with me being the one living queen on my own club.”
A portrait of all five artists is also featured on the 11th Street wall, showing them as viewed through a keyhole.
Approved by the San Francisco Arts Commission, “Showtime” was funded by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s Queer Artists for Queer Spaces project, the Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District and Drollinger’s newly established nonprofit organization, Oasis Arts.
“When D’Arcy asked me to do it, I automatically said, ‘I don’t want to do this by myself,’ ” saidGay. “Christopher was already on board and he also wanted to make this a collaboration, then we got Elliott into it. There was no way any of us wanted to do this unless it was in a group.”
“It’s a big project,” added Carmona. “The scope and the size of this work — we never would attempt this without each other. We want this to have a high level of design that combines all of our styles.”
Those styles are admittedly very diverse.
Gay is known for highly realistic murals like “Gear Up” on the side of Castro bar Moby Dick, which shows a leather jacket, sneakers and sailor cap among other signifiers of subcultures within the LGBTQ community. Malvaez and Carmona, who also collaborated on the 2021 mural “Queeroes” at the San Francisco LGBT Center, both tend to be more abstract, with Malvaez favoring angular figure sketches and Carmona using large blocks of color. Nathan’s preferred aesthetic is derived from graffiti hieroglyphic (think fellow queer street artist Keith Haring). He also has a penchant for repetition and pattern, as seen in his painting of the club’s dumpster. McCutcheon is influenced by work he does with metal as a foundry sculptor, with his use of shape being especially distinct.
“We’ve all known each other for years, so with those friendships, it was an easy collaboration,” said Nathan. “And D’Arcy pretty much let us make the decisions about what was included, other than giving us a list of people he thought should be on the wall.”
With all these diverging visions, the predominantly pink-and-red color scheme of the mural — with bursts of yellow and touches of black and white for definition — serves as the main unifying element of the work. At a distance, the mix of styles and figures harmonizes. But as you get closer, it becomes more clear where one artist’s work ends and another begins.
“It’s funny, even though we’re all so different in our aesthetics, by the second time we all got together we basically knew what would be included,” said McCutcheon. “Our designs for how we thought the wall space should be used were very similar.”
Painting the mural took roughly a month from start to finish, and the artists are already proposing further collaborations.
“I hope we might eventually do another mural with even more wall space, something even more ambitious,” Nathan said. “That way, we could include even more artists. When you have that much surface to cover, more artists are definitely better.”
