How a Queer Art Collective Built a Truly Accessible DIY Scene

Maybe on a long Sunday summer evening, you’ve seen the capes fluttering by Lake Merritt. Sometimes attendees join in, getting up to perform during the open drag set portion of Queer Mythos, the monthly lakeside drag show. It’s one of many events staged by DIY Museum, a Bay Area queer arts collective.

To be clear, DIY Museum is not a permanent physical gallery space. It’s a quietly radical art and event collective dedicated to fostering community and welcoming all, with a focus on prioritizing access for the most marginalized folks.

An outdoor drag show is a perfect example of the group’s commitment to accessibility and inclusion, words that often get tossed around in theory but are less frequently put into practice. Most DIY Museum events are entirely free of charge or low-cost ($10 or less). The collective partners with venues that are wheelchair accessible and easily reached by public transit, such as Oakland’s Rock Paper Scissors Collective, where many of the group’s 2024 events have been held so far.

Members of the collective, which now numbers over a dozen, organize events based on their own interests, and whatever they feel is missing from the arts community — whether that’s a creating exclusive designs for the second annual Sticker Faire (coming up on Aug. 3) or holding a discussion on mutual aid.

‘Can we start an art collective?’

Founder B Thompson first had the idea for DIY Museum while studying at UCLA a few years ago. They started co-organizing events at the now-defunct Nous Tous Gallery, including one called “Community Gatherings,” offline meet-ups organized around a theme like belonging or queerness and fluidity.

Now, Community Gatherings are a staple of DIY Museum’s programming, held every Wednesday evening. Starting in August, they’ll be at a new venue: Oakland’s Crisis Club Gallery.

Despite having deep roots in Los Angeles, the cost of going between Northern and Southern California became too great for Thompson. So in 2023, they settled permanently in the East Bay, working as a substitute teacher and focusing on building out DIY here.

With collective member Ruby Piper, they met Mel Zaballos, who was already organizing monthly craft hang-outs in various San Francisco parks. “We can call it whatever, but can we start an art collective?” Thompson asked their friends. They all agreed to keep the name.

DIY Museum hosts open mic nights and organizes workshops on a wide variety of art practices, like papermaking, bookbinding and kandi bracelet-making. For those seeking likeminded company, “Do It Together” are low-key gatherings where anyone can show up with their own art supplies and make work while socializing. In addition to weekly Community Gatherings, the collective stages an average of half a dozen events every month.

Prioritizing accessibility

As the frequency of events increased last fall, it became clear that accessibility would be a core value of their work. “Accessibility — especially COVID accessibility — is and has been really important to me because I’m immunocompromised. I also have a disability that limits my movement and general spoon levels,” Piper explains. “I was so tired of missing out on events because they were not physically accessible to me. All I wanted for so long was community.”

In October 2023, pro-Palestinian protests were also raising awareness about the importance of masking, both to counter surveillance and protect people from airborne diseases. “Mask culture was starting to be normalized, and thankfully, we had people in our community who were outspoken in advocating for masks and accessibility,” Zaballos notes. “It’s nice to have a safe space for people where they know that we care.”

Thompson adds that accessibility — physically accessible spaces and requiring and providing high-quality masks such as KN95s with the support of Mask Bloc East Bay — simply brings in bigger crowds. “People come to our events and say, ‘I wouldn’t have come if you weren’t masking,’” they say.

In January 2024, E Aviles joined the collective, drawn by these very principles. “At that phase of the pandemic, I felt increasingly socially isolated, like I didn’t have people around me who had the same social values,” they explain.

Meeting the DIY Museum collective, they felt like they could grow with the group. “I can be my full self here,” Aviles says, “in all the ways I am grieving, managing disability and sickness, feeling anger at the world at large, and navigating multiple identities.”

Part of the group’s work is imagining inaccessible events through an accessibility lens. Piper muses, “What does it look like to have a rave that is safe for people with seizures and is masked?” After the collective attended Crip Ecstasy, a drag show and dance party at San Francisco’s CounterPulse last year, they’re planning to stage a similar, even more sensory-inclusive event.

Building sustainably

While values like access are steady, other exciting changes are constantly afoot. For example, Piper and Aviles, who both have science backgrounds, are looking at ways to spearhead workshops around science-related practices such as food cultivation, fermentation, composting and medicine-making. “STEM was pushed heavy on us and suffocated my artistic spirit — and I was complicit in that suffocation,” Aviles explains. “This collective tends to those wounds.”

Eventually, the collective dreams of moving into a permanent space. Their ideal location would be open for drop-in art-making, or simply offer an accessible, welcoming third space where people could hang out. They recently launched a profile on Comradery, a creator subscription platform where they’re hoping to attract more sustainable financial support from community members.

It’s clear they’ve created something special. Desire for safe, artistic meeting points continues to grow. A year ago, DIY Museum might have welcomed five people to an event. Now, 50 people show up.