The Take-Off: A Queer Art Showcase

The Take-Off is a queer art showcase where artists and community come together to create, resist, and imagine new worlds.
About this Event

The Take-Off: A Queer Art Showcase

The Take-Off is a queer art showcase centering visual artists and performers across disciplines, creating space for experimentation, visibility, and collective expression. Rooted in San Francisco’s lineage of radical queer creativity, this event exists to gather us in a time when gathering matters.

This is not just a show. It’s a collective act of building and becoming.

The Take-Off uplifts emerging and established artists alike, prioritizing community over competition and collaboration over isolation. We believe queer art is a lifeline, a place to process, to resist, to imagine, and to build new worlds together.

Suggested donations support production costs, sustain independent queer art spaces, and contribute to a community organization. Every tier is named in honor of historic queer figures who shaped San Francisco’s cultural landscape, because what we build now is part of a much longer lineage.

Come as you are. Show up for the art. Show up for each other.

Donation Tiers (NOTAFLOF)

Community Entry | Free
This tier gives anyone access to the event regardless of financial means. Come as you are, experience the art, and be part of the collective energy of The Take-Off. (No One Turned Away For Lack Of Funds)

Dreamer | Bernice Bing | $5
Bernice Bing was a Chinese American abstract painter and a vital presence in the Bay Area art scene from the Beat era onward. As a queer artist of color, she carved space in movements that often excluded women and LGBTQ+ voices. Her work expanded what abstraction could hold, including identity, spirituality, and resistance.
Tier purpose: Supports accessibility and keeps the doors open for everyone.

Sustainer | Jerome Caja | $15
Jerome Caja was a central figure in San Francisco’s 1980s and 1990s queer underground. Known for painting on unconventional surfaces like toilet seats, his work fused camp, punk, and grief during the height of the AIDS crisis. Caja embodied fearless queer expression deeply rooted in San Francisco community life.
Tier purpose: Helps sustain production costs and protects space for bold, experimental queer expression.

Amplifier | Wayne Quinn | $25
Wayne Douglas Quinn was a San Francisco based painter known for his photorealist style and nuanced explorations of queer identity. Working in the 1970s, his work captured vulnerability, intimacy, and the everyday realities of queer life in San Francisco. Quinn’s paintings remain a vital record of queer artistic expression in the city’s history.
Tier purpose: Strengthens independent queer art infrastructure and ensures artists have platforms to be seen.

Empowerer | Mark Thompson | $40+
Mark Thompson was a San Francisco writer, editor, and historian dedicated to preserving queer intellectual and cultural history. During the AIDS era, his work helped document and elevate LGBTQ+ voices at a time when erasure was rampant. He ensured queer stories were not only told, but remembered.
Tier purpose: Affirms that queer art sustains and strengthens our collective. This tier supports production and contributes to community resources, investing in the present and the future of queer creative life.