Bootleg @ Bass & Reiner Gallery

Editor’s Pick

“T-shirts by thirty-one artists fill Bass & Reiner gallery, hanging from string strung across the space. Bootleg, presented by The Basement, an art collective and VHS archive in the Mission District makes visible what is, for me, one of the best aspects of meeting people, especially artists: learning what they love, what they are thinking about. Odes to bands, historical events, children’s television, cult movies, favorite delis, underground political movements are recreated and remixed into these (very affordable) works.”

-Aaron Harbour

About the Exhibition

Bootleg is a group exhibition of artist-made t-shirts curated by The Basement, an art collective and VHS archive in San Francisco’s Mission District. The shirts in this exhibition are emphatic statements, approximations, facsimiles, riffs, and things we have always dreamed of but could never find. 

The artists were invited to make bootleg shirts with the only limitation being that they couldn’t make more than ten copies. Size, price, and content were otherwise entirely left to their imaginations.