Debra “Beaver” Bauer has had the sort of career many artists would envy.
In the early ’70s, she became part of the San Francisco underground art scene that featured R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. She was the resident wardrobe designer for the avant-garde theatre company Angels of Light.
Her eye-catching designs have been worn by performers for the American Conservatory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Teatro ZinZanni, as well as Olympic gold-medal figure skater Brian Boitano.
Given the heights she’s achieved, one has to wonder if she misses her street-artist days.
“Absolutely and unequivocally, yes!” says Bauer, whose language can be as elaborate and one-of-a-kind as her costumes.
“I long for making it up with my friends, and being irreverent and not too precious. I might not have the physical stamina of yore for that amount of effort, as I am now 76, but the mind is cracking pretty lively!”
Now her career is the subject of a retrospective at the San Francisco Public Library. “From Street to Stage” opens on Nov. 5. It collects more than five decades of photos, sketches, film and video clips, as well as costume elements created by the eclectic artist.
The show is as much a testament to Bauer’s artistry as it is a love letter to the city where she refined her talent.
Although she’d thoroughly documented her own work for years, the idea of creating a proper exhibit only arose when her full-time costume work came to an end.
“My steady employment with Teatro ZinZanni ended with their tents in Seattle and Chicago closing a week apart,” she recalls.
“I thought I should do something I have not done, that it might lead to placement of my Angel archives and personal career archives. [And] that my secret hope of doing a very deep and complete exhibition on the Angels would be more approachable, having done something smaller first.”
In addition to her theatrical work, the show will include a section dedicated to “The Bus Queen’s Gazette,” a set of sketches Bauer began drawing of Muni bus riders in 2016.
“Bus queen” is the name she gave herself, to reflect her devotion to public transportation. Even with the rise of ride-share and self-driving cars, Bauer finds the city’s bus system endlessly inspiring.
“The cast that rides the buses in San Francisco could not be richer,” says Bauer, who has ridden Muni since 1970.
“Yes, I bemoan long waits, and carrying a lot, and hoping for a seat, and the smells. But what you see and hear and what the street philosophers might utter, it can be a gold mine! I find that costuming deals with people and how they move and what they look like, so being observant of the smorgasbord offered is quite dazzling and edifying.”
Taking inspiration from the world around her and giving back to the public has been a core tenet of Bauer’s work. It’s why she preferred the SF Public Library for the show, over an admission-fee gallery.
Whatever SFPL’s practical limitations, “it is the library,” she says. “I wanted the exhibit to be free, in honor of the Angels’ ‘Free to the Public’ credo. Also, paramount to me was that I was not selling anything. That it was for the public, not a rarefied theater audience or those with an economic status, and that it could be accessible to people who might never consider going to a gallery — to get seduced to walk down the stairs and go inside.”
Above all, Bauer insists that the unifying theme behind both the show and the 50 years that led to it is what both say about humanity as a whole. The work itself, even flawed, represents the creativity that only the human mind could conceive.
“I have never used AI, [and] I do not know Photoshop,” she says. “A pencil, pen, or brush in my hand [on] a piece of paper is the most pleasurable, relaxing and rewarding thing in the world to me.”
Similarly, her work in the performing arts represents her wish to bring people together in a shared experience.
The retrospective “will hopefully encourage people to go to the theater, [and] celebrate the people who make the costumes,” she says. They’ll “be surprised in what they discover about themselves. To be wildly different is an act of revolution, and to embrace transformation.”
“From Street to Stage” runs from Nov. 5, 2026, through Apr. 11, 2027, in the Jewett Gallery of the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch, 100 Larkin St.