Hold Each Other's Hands: Trans Mutual Aid, 1966-1996

September 1 - December 5, 2026

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 4pm
Opening evenings for events

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 will hold 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.

This exhibition is curated by Umi Hsu, Fall 2026 Professor of Practice at Occidental College, and co-presented by One Institute and OXY ARTS as a part of One Institute’s Circa: Queer Histories Festival.

About the Curator

Umi Hsu

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.

https://www.umihsu.studio/

About The Artists

Xixi Edelsbrunner

Leslie Foster

Wesleigh Gates

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai

Salvador de la Torre

Whisper

Xixi Edelsbrunner (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist and transplant to Los Angeles, California, where they live an abundantly domestic life. Their practice is sustained by urges of disabled villainy, as well as an affinity for the aesthetic qualities of generic and mass-produced things.

xixiedelsbrunner.com

Leslie Foster (he/they) is an artist based in Los Angeles (occupied Gabrielino-Tongva land) whose work folds experimental film into multi-sensory installations to create pocket universes. His love for storytelling is inspired by a childhood spent in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Berrien Springs, Michigan. Leslie uses video art and installation to create beautifully strange contemplative ecologies that explore Black and queer futurity through the lens of dream logic. Much of their practice is rooted in community-building through art-making and collaboration.

Leslie completed his MFA in Design | Media Arts at UCLA in 2022 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022. Their work, which was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize in 2020, and awarded the LACE Lightning Fund in 2023, has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including two exhibitions at the Torrance Art Museum, a show at the Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles, and two solo shows. His work has also been exhibited at film and video art festivals around the world, including Outfest, where his four-channel installation Heavenly Brown Body, won a Grand Jury Prize. Leslie is a Lucas Art Residency Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center in Saratoga, CA, completed a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California in 2024, and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Time-based Media at Cal State San Marcos. He regularly daydreams about running away with a seafaring band of nomadic artists.

www.lesliefoster.art

Wesleigh Gates is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher, working primarily in performance. She holds an MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently a PhD candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA. Wesleigh's practice engages both the ephemeral relationality that emerges between artist and audience in performance, and the lasting relationships of mutual support that can develop during the collaborative process. To the latter end, she recently established TSLUR (Transfems in Solidarity Leading Unconventional Research), a Los Angeles-based performance research studio committed to building infrastructures for transfeminine artists (and those in solidarity with us) to connect and thrive as knowledge producers, creative innovators, and community builders. Her contribution to this exhibition was created through TSLUR in collaboration with artists June Bernardin, Farah Daoud, edxi, Elaina Marino, Ravindu Ranawaka, and Josie Wreck.

www.wesleighgates.com

Photo credit: Argel Rojo

Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (b. Bangkok, Thailand) is a transdisciplinary artist, curator, and art worker, working between Los Angeles, CA and St Paul, Minnesota. Through performative lectures, videos, and site-specific installations, their practice questions nationalist narratives at the base of Euro-centric masculine power and its effects on other forms of identity and sense of belonging. They received a Visual Arts Degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole and a License in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They hold a BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and a MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

www.primasakuntabhai.com

Photo credit: Rik Sferra

Salvador de la Torre is a Mexican-born Texas-raised artist, educator and storyteller based in Los Angeles. Their drawing and performance work invoke the power of personal experience and family history to create artworks that exist at the intersection of activism, art production and praxes of self-acceptance.

Their work engages politics of migration, memory, queerness, and gender in ways that remind us of the power and solidarity that can exist in quotidian gestures. De la Torre’s production opens channels for theorizing vulnerability, intimacy, and proximity as radical undertakings in the space of the borderlands and beyond. In doing so, their work forges complex narratives of joy, struggle, adaptability, exhaustion and tenderness, as counternarratives that assert the wholeness, nuance, and humanity of immigrant communities, and queer subjectivities.

Salvador earned an MFA from California State University, Fullerton and a BA from Texas A&M International University.

salvadordelatorre.com

Whisper (she/her) is an artist and hacker based in Los Angeles, working across poetry, performance, software, and hardware. She dreams of a future where we hold with reverence the knowledge that our computers come from the ground. Whisper organizes around digital autonomy with Resonant.love and Secret Server Club. She is also co-steward of New Art City virtual art space, which she helped found in 2020.

hyperwhisper.net

Hold Each Other's Hands: Trans Mutual Aid, 1966-1996

About the Curator

About The Artists

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