A Return to Normalcy at the Clipper House

Greetings Friends!

It is our pleasure to invite you to the Return to Normalcy event held at 584 Clipper Street on June 26th. While things are not completely back to normal, it is finally safe to spend time with other people who are vaccinated and enjoy live music again. Despite this, the music industry in San Francisco is slow to wake up after being battered by COVID complications and systemic economic burdens from those complications.

The Red Poppy Art House is one of those victims. Since 2003, the indoor music venue and cultural art center has been closed after spending 17 consecutive years offering live music and art to the community. As the Red Poppy gets ready to open its doors again to share its gifts with the Bay Area once more, they certainly could use any financial support possible to do so. As a member of the Red Poppy's leadership team, I could not be more excited to support this wonderful organization's efforts.

For artists, they have been just as burdened as venues have, if not more! The musicians of the local jazz band Hipsteria have been playing regularly for over a decade, and all of the venues they have been accustomed to playing at have been completely inactive since the start of COVID. Jazz is already typically undervalued within our communities, but at the same time, it has regularly lit the spirits of its audiences since its birth.

Please join us for music, food, drink, and the celebration of the ability to reunite in person at the Return for Normalcy event.

Event Details and more info on the Red Poppy Art House can be found below:

• Where: 584 Clipper Street, San Francisco, CA
• When: Saturday, June 26th from 5 pm to 10 pm
• Cost: $40 per ticket
• What your ticket gets you: Live jazz, several courses of delicious food, beer, and sangria
• Safety: In order to attend this event, you must be vaccinated. The event will be held outdoors and masks should be worn when inside to use the bathroom or otherwise

The Red Poppy Art House (“The Poppy”) was founded in 2003 to serve as an intercultural and multidisciplinary “space of encounter,” a hub where multiple social-cultural groups could interconnect to experience one another and therefore potentiate one another’s endeavors while weaving a more solid and tolerant social fabric. It began as a working artist studio that offered classes in painting and Argentine tango, a weekly jazz night, and curated exhibitions. Towards the end of that first year, the Poppy initiated the Mission Arts & Performance Project (MAPP), as a community-wide initiative with shared values. Since that time, the Poppy’s organization has been gradually evolving through the years in order to respond to the needs and opportunities presented by its surrounding community and the arts ecology at large. Central among them is how such a tiny space can continue to exist within a market-driven economy without having to “grow” or perish. Can one be small, meaningful, and effective, and still flourish?

After seventeen years since its founding, the organization’s role within the arts ecology has become highly recognized and valued among its local community and the broader Bay Area. As an artist-centered organization, it has managed to maintain an internal culture of creativity, that is, a feeling of non-linear spontaneity at its core, in order to prevent the administrative functioning to overshadow its purpose – its reason for being.

In 2007 the Red Poppy Art House gained fiscal sponsorship through Intersection for the Arts, joining the organization’s Arts Incubator program.

Host or Publisher CRAVE Productions