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Nigel Poor\u2019s dining room wall appears to be covered entirely in trash.<\/p>\n
In the space above the dining table in her Hunter\u2019s Point townhouse, where one might normally hang a painting, are pinned an ornate, Victorian-era-looking spoon, a lone Barbie doll leg, a crumpled badminton birdie and various smushed tin objects that may have once been sardine tins and aerosol cans.<\/p>\n
There are only two objects with any text on them: the ripped front cover of a book, \u201cOf Human Bondage,\u201d and a little scrap of a poem titled \u201cJESUS THE BIKER.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cHe was a lot like you and me,\u201d the poem reads. \u201cThe government didn\u2019t like him.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask Poor, who is trained as a photographer, if the collection is part of \u201dFOUND,<\/a>\u201d the 1998-2000 black-and-white print series she took of found objects. \u201cSome of it is \u2014 but I can\u2019t stop doing it.\u201d She likes to collect objects, she says, and gestures to her partner fussing around in the kitchen behind us. \u201cAnd so does Rick.\u201d<\/p>\n Poor grabs her keys and drives us to the former San Francisco shipyard off Hunters Point, and parks in front of a weather-worn wooden barrack. It\u2019s her art studio. We walk inside.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou can open any drawer or anything that\u2019s interesting to you,\u201d says Poor.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhy would you give me so much freedom?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBecause that\u2019s what I would want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not quite what I want to do. I look at Poor. Poor is lean and, at 62, looks younger. She has two shots of birch-white that streak through her otherwise dark brown hair, one on either temple. She\u2019s been an artist for most of her life \u2014 and a podcast host for the last decade or so, having co-hosted \u201cEar Hustle<\/a>\u201d since 2017, a show about the daily realities of prison life in San Quentin State Prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEar Hustle\u201d has since been so successful that it\u2019s spawned over 75 million downloads across 130 episodes, a Pulitzer nomination and four cross-country tours. This Saturday, Poor and co-host Earlonne Woods will kick off the first leg of their latest cross-country tour, this time at San Francisco\u2019s own Toni Rembe Theatre<\/a> downtown.<\/p>\n Poor first got interested in working in prisons through three separate events, she later tells me. First, hearing a chance radio broadcast about Kresty Prison inspired Poor to visit the detention center in Russia.\u00a0<\/p>\n Standing outside the Saint Petersburg prison, she became fascinated with these strange cone-shaped objects littered outside the prison: prisoners would write notes on pieces of paper and then weigh them down with the bread that they ate inside. Throwing these breaded-paper objects outside their window was their only way of communicating with those outside.<\/p>\n Some time later, at home in San Francisco, Poor received a misdelivered letter from an incarcerated person at San Quentin Prison. Then it happened to her two more times. By the time she heard that the Prison University Project was looking for a history of art professor, she knew she had to apply. (Poor is a professor at California State University of Sacramento.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Working at the prison, Poor quickly learned that many of her incarcerated students were serving draconian sentences under California\u2019s former three-strike policy<\/a>. \u201cAt first when I didn\u2019t know a lot about it, I was like, well, people commit three crimes. Maybe, you know, maybe it\u2019s the right thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But then, Poor tells me, she found incarcerated individuals who would get a third strike for \u201cridiculous\u201d things: One individual received a third strike \u2014 and ultimately a life sentence \u2014 for stealing $40 from a cash register.<\/p>\n Poor gravitates to prisoners for the same reason she collects found objects in her studio; she likes neglected things. As a child struggling with dyslexia she remembers being rejected by teachers at her school, who called her \u201cstupid.\u201d It might sound silly, she tells me. But the experience has never quite left her \u2014 and she has since taken an interest in the downtrodden in life.<\/p>\n And the random, which includes objects in her home. When I ask her to show me her favorites, Poor picks up a small clay house with what looks like a spinning wheel that loops in and out the structure. She tells me that her parents brought it back for her when she was a kid, probably from Switzerland. She twists the little crank on the side of the house. Music plays. The cart starts spinning round on the track until suddenly \u2014 click.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDid you hear that?\u201d she asks. The music stops.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was something about that click that even as a little kid, it was so definitive to me that it was about the end of something, and it reminded me \u2014 or it made me think about, like, everything\u2019s going to end,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n I tell Poor she was a profound child. She smiles.<\/p>\n One of the reasons that photography appealed to her as a child, she says, was because it\u2019s about freezing a moment in time and \u201cmaking time something you can hold in your hand and look at.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n We walk to the other side of the studio. Poor hands me a small glass jar. It\u2019s filled with flies \u2014 about 287 of them, more or less \u2014 that Poor has meticulously collected and photographed<\/a> and blown up to fill nine-by-nine-inch prints. The flies are so large and detailed that I start to have the sense that there is something surreal to the photos.<\/p>\n Poor starts rattling off facts. The average fly lives for 14 to 21 days; it lays a quintillion<\/a> eggs. It\u2019s a number she had never thought of before, she says, and flies she associated with excrement and disease. \u201cBut then it does something that\u2019s more amazing than any of us will ever do, which is to make us think of the number quintillion, right.\u201d\u00a0 Even though facts about the common fly say otherwise, it\u2019s a word that Poor associates with flies and that she\u2019s never thought of before.<\/p>\n She pauses. \u201cAnd so I started thinking of the fly as, like, the skull at the bottom of a monk\u2019s bed. Something to make us think about time passing.\u201d<\/p>\n Ear Hustle Live! is coming to the Toni Rembe Theatre<\/a> in San Francisco on Saturday Apr. 11 at 8 p.m. Get tickets<\/a> for the Apr. 11 show or see all<\/a> upcoming tour dates.<\/p>\n 3,300 readers keep Mission Local free. Will you join them?\u00a0<\/p>\n There are no paywalls at Mission Local. We believe San Francisco deserves critical, high-impact reporting that belongs to all its residents, not just those who can afford it.\u00a0<\/p>\n But free to read doesn\u2019t mean free to produce. We\u2019re a small, independent newsroom rooted in San Francisco\u2019s communities that only exists because people like you invest in the reporting that our city relies on all year round.\u00a0<\/p>\n Keep Mission Local free for all by becoming a donor today.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re growing! Mission Local is expanding, adding dedicated neighborhood reporters across the city. We\u2019re also launching neighborhood landing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2308,18362,2901,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-259754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-art","tag-people-we-meet","tag-prison","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/P1010055-853x640.jpg\")
Pinned onto the wall of her art studio, Nigel Poor has curated several whimsical prints and photos. Photo by Iryna Humenyuk.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/P1010051-853x640.jpg\")
Nigel Poor poses in her artist\u2019s studio in Hunters Point, San Francisco. Photo by Iryna Humenyuk.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/P1010027-853x640.jpg\")
Nigel Poor was gifted a clay house as a child from her parents. It plays music and contains a track that spins on a wheel. Photo by Iryna Humenyuk.<\/p>\n![\"Several](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/P1010036-853x640.jpg\")
Nigel Poor mounted several fly prints onto small, white circular discs. Photo by Iryna Humenyuk.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1769002152_784_dolores8-edit-1-879x640.jpg\")
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