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 Tenderolin 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.
Participant Bios
Umi Hsu is a sound artist, curator, and ethnomusicologist. Combining ethnographic writing, oral history, experimental performance, and field recording, their artistic and curatorial practice makes tangible the sensory and relational patterns of queer, trans, Asian American, and immigrant lives, provoking inquiries into generational temporality, deep time, and diasporic geography. Through sound and curation, they build aspirational worlds that invite audiences into time-spaces where past and future memories can be felt and new relationships can emerge.
Hsu teaches in the MFA Media Design Practices program at ArtCenter College of Design and previously directed exhibitions and public programs at One Institute. Their work has been presented by LACMA, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, SOAS, CTM Festival (Berlin), ONE Archives, Human Resources, Ting Shuo Hear Say, Automata, and Radio Alhara, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, KCET, Giant Robot, and Dublab. Hsu holds a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia and has received fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation, the City of West Hollywood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the ArtCenter College of Design Faculty Council, and LA Metro.
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.
OXY ARTS is a vital public space bringing together the Occidental College community, the Northeast Los Angeles community, and local and regional artists in socially conscious dialogue and engagement. We seek to share, connect and hold space for ideas and curiosity.