Hospitality House Secures Future in Historic Luggage Store Gallery Building

After more than a decade serving the neighborhood’s arts community, Hospitality House has purchased the historic Luggage Store Gallery building at 1007 Market Street.

Hospitality House Executive Director Joe Wilson (4th from left) and SF Mayor Daniel Lurie (3rd from right) with Hospitality House staff and artists.

This secures a lasting home for the nonprofit’s Community Arts Program, a studio and gallery that’s been a creative refuge for low-income and unhoused artists for 15 years.

CAST, San Francisco’s Community Arts Stabilization Trust, first acquired the building in 2014 to prevent its loss to private sale and ensure it would remain an affordable space for community-driven arts. This August, with the support of the San Francisco Foundation’s Bay Area Community Impact Fund and the dedication of many partners, Hospitality House was able to make that ownership permanent.

447 Minna provides affordable rentable space, exposure, and resources to the San Francisco Bay Area's creatives.

CAST has facilitated the purchase of several buildings that provide arts non-profits with affordable homes like Oakstop, KALW, Counterpulse, 447 Minna (just to name a few). To say that the work CAST does for art and artists in the Bay Area is invaluable, would be an understatement.

Hospitality House believes that creative self-expression and a vibrant community culture should not be exclusive to areas of means. Since 1967, Hospitality House’s Community Arts Program (CAP) has been the only free-of-charge fine arts studio and gallery space for artists and neighborhood residents whose socioeconomic struggles would otherwise prevent them from accessing the powerful artistic and cultural landscape of this community.

PBS NewsHour Spotlights Hospitality House (2018)

Each year, more than 3,500 artists benefit from the free materials and space to create, house, exhibit, and sell their artwork. The CAP hosts regular exhibitions at its on-site gallery, located at 1009 Market Street at 6th Street, as well as at other locations around San Francisco. Participating artists keep 100% of the proceeds from any work purchased at one of our exhibitions.

The Luggage store building can now be (a permanent) safe space to dream, to create, to host a community where stories are shared and ideas blossom, transformed into drawings, paintings, sculptures. This space is Hospitality House’s Community Arts Program.