This conversation will expand on how some of the artworks included in Hold Each Other’s Hands engage with the history of space and spatial politics. Xixi Edelsbrunner's installation wrestles with hostile architecture and carceral politics surrounding trans, unhoused, and disabled bodies. Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai's project makes tangible an imagined trans cartography composed of sites of ruins with regenerative power and interstitiality. 

OXY ARTS and the Media Arts & Culture (MAC) Department welcome you to attend a book launch celebration and conversation with MAC Professor Katarzyna Marciniak, whose latest monograph, Refugee Cinema, co-authored with Dr. Bruce Bennett, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

Through visual art and sound, Spirit in the Dark Body explores black queer spiritualities in their various forms in order to reflect that something beyond the physical– whether it be community, ritual, care, love, or something else– that moves in/with/through black queer bodies. “Dark body” symbolizes the mystery, refusals, obscurations, layers of fabulosity, liminality, and becoming of blackness, queerness, and spirituality.

Join OXY ARTS in celebrating the launch of Why the Arts Matter: How Art Shapes Our Thinking, Identity, and Wellbeing by Occidental College Professors Aleksandra Sherman and Clair Morrissey. 

The evening will feature a brief book talk, Q&A, and invitations to engage in meaningful ways with the current exhibition at OXY ARTS. Reception with light hors d'oeuvres and drinks to follow. 

A selection of trans mutual aid stories and oral histories related to the Hold Each Other’s Hands exhibition will be transmitted via a hyperlocal FM radio signal. The program title references TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism published in 1993-1995. 

Curator Umi Hsu will give a tour of the Hold Each Other’s Hands exhibition. Visitors will get a glimpse into the artworks and stories behind working with the artists and the historical contexts of the archival collection featured in the exhibition.

Please RSVP at this link to join us! 

Bring a friend and come mingle with other movement makers and thinkers in a curated mix of mutual aid “speed dating” activities, facilitated by Provvidenza Catalano, a Los Angeles-based community motivator, teacher, performance artist, and organizer of Them Fatale Drag Kings.

In a lecture performance in conversation with her video installation included in the exhibition, Wesleigh Gates traces the historical conjunctures between transfeminine life and the figure of the extraterrestrial. The performance juxtaposes historical trans activists Angela Douglas and Marsha P. Johnson with contemporary right-wing politicians and pundits, exploring how both have found meaning in connecting trans womanhood to alien beings.

Join the Media Arts and Culture department's 2026 Artist-in-Residence Anahid Yahjian ’11 for an evening of contemporary media works made by and/or about transnational Armenian women, curated around the embodied stages of girlhood and womanhood.

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.