Hold My Hand in Yours

Saturday, September 6, 2025 - Sunday, March 29, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 6, 3-6 PM

Across a wide range of practices in contemporary art, the hand appears over and over again as a symbolic image, nodding to its role as an artistic tool par excellence. As this exhibition underscores, the hand also alludes to forms of labor and care that resonate beyond the realm of art-making. Constantina Zavitsanos’s elegant installation of ascending bathroom grab bars highlights pervasive inaccessibility, while Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader use humor to demonstrate how much American Sign Language relies on facial cues in concert with linguistic expression. Christine Mitchell Adams and Samantha Roth document the daily choreography of maternal care. Elana Mann and Sharon Chohi Kim explore sound as a means of amplifying silenced voices. Karl Haendel’s drawing of Amanda Ross-Ho’s hands—paired with one of her monumentally scaled latex gloves—underscores both the hand as a tool and the communities that shape artistic practice. The collective AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) invites visitors to hold ceramics collaboratively produced across the U.S.–Mexico border. Other artists engage the hand as witness or archive: Sabrina Gschwandtner’s quilted film stills honor undervalued women’s labor, Stephanie Syjuco reframes colonial-era photographs to protect their subjects, Andrea Chung memorializes the ghosts that inhabit the mythic realm of Drexciya, Joetta Maue mines the family archive for moments of tenderness, and Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July reactivate Learning to Love You More’s Assignment #30 with new submissions online and in the museum.

Hold My Hand in Yours also explores artists‘ synecdochical use of the hand as a stand-in for the body. Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) isolates her hand in motion during postsurgical recovery, while Carmen Argote’s fingerprints and surface scratches register bodily presence and yearning. Janine Antoni positions the hand as a means of grounding and transcending the body, and Roksana Pirouzmand’s animatronic clay figure links her body with her mother’s hands. Kelly Akashi’s bronze cast, made after the Eaton Fire destroyed her home and studio, extends her series documenting the hand’s subtle transformations over time. Lauren Seiden’s graphite-filled glass vessels record the hand’s trace in fragile fissures that reveal the invisible labor of maintenance. 

Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, video, installation, and social practice, Hold My Hand in Yours foregrounds the hand as a crucial agent of touch, connection, and social exchange. In an era of digital distance, these works return us to the radical potential of the hand as a symbol of closeness, memory, and shared experience.

Participating artists and collectives: Art Made Between Opposite Sides (AMBOS), Christine Mitchell Adams, Kelly Akashi, Janine Antoni, Carmen Argote, Andrea Chung, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Karl Haendel, Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Cara Levine, Elana Mann and Sharon Chohi Kim, Joetta Maue, Roksana Pirouzmand, Yvonne Rainer, Amanda Ross-Ho, Samantha Roth, Lauren Seiden, Stephanie Syjuco, and Constantina Zavitsanos.

Hold My Hand in Yours is curated by Weisman Museum of Art director Andrea Gyorody. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by Diane Reilly and the Pasadena Art Alliance. 

---

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Opening Reception
Saturday, September 6, from 3 to 6 PM 
Join us to celebrate the public opening of Hold My Hand in Yours on Saturday, September 6, from 3 to 6 PM. Enjoy complimentary refreshments, family-friendly art activities in the Sculpture Garden, and a panel discussion with featured artists in the exhibition. Limited seating for the talk is first come, first served. Registration for the reception is recommended but not required.

Nothing can come of nothing, speak again
Performance by Sharon Chohi Kim and Elana Mann
Saturday, November 8, 2025, 4 PM
This performance by Sharon Chohi Kim and Elana Mann fuses sonic sculpture and voice, amplifying the tensions of freedom of speech, the dissonances of communication, and the attempted silencing of voices. Performers move, listen and vocalize, activating sound and silence, with Mann’s Call to Arms sculptures and costumes and Kim’s composition and direction. The performance includes a list of words banned by the current presidential administration and a composition that confronts the silencing of women's voices, while offering strategies for collective empowerment. Accompanying the performance is ASL interpreter/performer Caroline Blaike.

Artist Talk: Cara Levine
Wednesday, November 19, Noon
Across her wide-ranging body of work, L.A.-based artist Cara Levine discusses the technology of touch and the potential of craft to create social change.  

More programs will be added soon—subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on what's happening at the Weisman.

---

Image: Joetta Maue, The Gesture of Touch (detail), 2019–ongoing, archival prints; details from vernacular photographs from family archive. Courtesy of the artist.