Join us for the opening reception for Hold Each Other’s Hands: Trans Mutual Aid 1966 – 1996, and the launch of the 2026 CIRCA Queer Histories Festival hosted by One Institute. The celebration will include a hosted bar and light bites.
Hold Each Other’s Hands chronicles a history of mutual aid led by transgender and gender expansive people. This exhibition explores how people with various relationships to gender nonconformity have worked together to develop inventive mutualistic models to create communities. With archival installations, contemporary artworks, featured speakers, and community programming, Hold Each Other’s Hands holds space for expansive thinking and public dialog around collectivity, co-existence, and care.
The title of the exhibition Hold Each Other’s Hands comes from Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson when describing coalitional futures in liberation work. The archival installations illuminate snapshots in trans history from the 1960s to the 1990s, spanning from to a multigenerational group of queens and unhoused kids in the Tenderloin in San Francisco in the late 1960s, to the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in 1970s New York City; from the lesbian abolitionist advocacy for gender nonconforming prisoners in East Los Angeles, to multiple decades of grassroots publishing of medical and legal information resources shared among activist networks in the United States and beyond. The archival objects, ephemera, and oral histories illustrate the systems created for survival, solidarity, and resistance, and for meeting essential needs such as housing, healthcare, and safety.
Six Los-Angeles-based artists, Leslie Foster, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Salvador de la Torre, Xixi Edelsbrunner, Wesleigh Gates, and Whisper (fka Sammie Veeler), present works that wrestle with hidden histories and speculate possible past and future realities. Using Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation—a modality of storytelling to depict “not only what was, but also what could be”—the artists parse through historical materials and experiment with storytelling. The archive comes to life, and is reconfigured and rematerialized through their practices and intersections with race, ethnicity, disability, the land, the carceral state, and border politics.
The exhibition will be on view from September 1 – December 5, 2026 from Monday – Saturday, 11am – 4pm. It will be open in the evenings during events as well.
Hold Each Other’s Hands is co-presented by One Institute and OXY ARTS as part of the 2026 Circa: Queer Histories Festival, presented by One Institute.