"Hold My Hand in Yours" at the Weisman Museum of Art /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

“Hold My Hand in Yours”

Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Mailbu, CA

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

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, intimacy, and care that resonate beyond the realm of art-making. Christine Mitchell Adams and Samantha Roth record the caresses, grips, and tugs of mothers and infants alike, while Karl Haendel embodies tenderness and vulnerability in his large-scale portraits. In Yvonne Rainer’s landmark Hand Movie (1966), she uses her fingers to dance while she is otherwise immobilized post-surgery, allowing her hand to stand in for the whole body, as do delicate fingerprints and scratches in Carmen Argote’s most recent paintings. Elana Mann sculpts noisemakers that look like hands, drawing a crucial connection between speech and action, while the duo Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader employ their hands (and faces) as vehicles of communication that exceed the capacity of spoken language.

Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and video, Hold My Hand in Yours foregrounds the hand as a crucial agent of touch, connection, and social exchange. Participating artists include Christine Mitchell Adams, Kelly Akashi, Carmen Argote, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Karl Haendel, Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Elana Mann and Sharon Chohi Kim, Joetta Maue, Roksana Pirouzmand, Yvonne Rainer, Samantha Roth, and Lauren Seiden.

Hold My Hand in Yours is curated by Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody.

"Lucid Dreaming: Hallucinations and Alternate Realities from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation" /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

Throughout history, artists have consistently provoked viewers to look at the world through a different lens. They have inspired a consideration of the difference between how things appear to be and how they could exist in an alternate, future, or augmented version of reality. Drawn from the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection, Lucid Dreaming presents works by artists who provoke us to think about the world we live in, the ground we stand on, and to take another look at the physical and psychological world we previously thought of as fixed as something more flexible and capable of change.

Digital catalog

February 28 – May 31, 2025

Thoma Art Vault Santa Fe
540 S. Guadalupe St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501

FEATURED ARTISTS:
Refik Anadol, Jim Campbell, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Olafur Eliasson, Miles Greenberg, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gary Hill, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lee Nam Lee, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Tatsuo Miyajima, Jamie Nares, Iván Navarro, Tony Oursler, Paul Pfeiffer, Quayola, Hiraki Sawa, UVA (United Visual Artists), and Yuge Zhou.

"Circumstances Held Me To Threads" at Shoshana Wayne Gallery /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

Circumstances Held Me To Threads, a group exhibition featuring works by Terri Friedman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Anina Major, Frances Trombly, and Michelle Yi Martin, opens 4-6pm on Saturday, May 24th, 2025. On view from May 24th to August 16, 2025.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery 5247 W. Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016

“Circumstances held me to threads and they won me over.” - Anni Albers

International Women's Day event at the Toledo Museum of Art, OH /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

On Saturday, March 8, 2025, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) and its Women & Allies Employee Resource Group will mark International Women’s Day with a day of engaging programs to honor the voices, stories, and achievements of women across cultures, highlighting their diverse experiences in the arts and beyond.

While artist Sabrina Gschwandtner has always pieced together film frames to highlight undervalued and often forgotten histories of women’s handcraft, her video “Three Overlooked Women Filmmakers” is a rare opportunity to see film brought to life. This work features excerpts by directors Alice Guy-Blache (Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance, 1897), Marion E. Wong (The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With the West, 1917), and Lotte Reiniger (Cinderella, 1922), demonstrating that women have been critical participants in film history since the beginning. Highlighting three distinct forms of movement through acting, dance, and stop-motion animation, this film shares their stories for viewers today.

"Step & Repeat" at the Los Angeles Municpal Art Gallery /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

March 6 to May 18, 2025

Public opening reception: Sunday, March 9, 2025, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

LA Municipal Art Gallery 4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) presents “Step & Repeat,” a group exhibition curated by Nancy Meyer and John Weston.

Inspired by the historical Pattern and Decoration movement of the mid-1970s and its impact across our region, “Step & Repeat” highlights 46 Southern California artists who engage with themes of pattern and decoration. The exhibition seeks to create a dialogue around those concepts, encompassing both works that directly explore the subject and those that approach it peripherally. The title, “Step & Repeat,” is a term used for publicity banners at special events, most notably seen at red-carpet premieres. While this slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to Hollywood hints at LAMAG’s physical proximity, it also reflects the repetitive and systematic qualities inherent in patterns within the works on view.

“Step & Repeat” delves into the exploration of patterns as both physical and psychological occurrences, emphasizing their repetitive and systematic qualities. The works on view analyze how patterns manifest in tangible forms while also reflecting the physical and internal, mental processes they evoke. The investigation of these concepts stems from a desire to explore how decoration, often dismissed as mere embellishment, serves deeper purposes of valorization and humanization. Rather, decoration can be a meaningful act that elevates and adds value to objects, spaces, or experiences, reflecting human creativity and the need to connect with the world. By examining these dual aspects, the exhibition reveals the ways in which pattern and decoration may lead to understanding the human impulse to “pattern” and “decorate” as tools for mapping expression, identity, and the interplay between aesthetics and function.

Other themes explored in the exhibition include feminism and domesticity, implications of altered states of consciousness such as meditation and flow states, and psychedelic aesthetics. By situating these themes within the broader context of pattern and decoration, “Step & Repeat” offers a multidimensional exploration of how artistic practices intersect with personal, cultural, and historical narratives. Step & Repeat will include four new site-specific installations by Patricia Fernández, Jaime Muñoz, Antonio Adriano Puleo, and Mark Dean Veca.

Artists in :Step & Repeat” include: Liv Aanrud, Merrick Adams, Nick Aguayo, Michelle Andrade, Amelia Baxter, Linda Besemer, Raghvi Bhatia, Carole Caroompas, Fritz Chesnut, Edi Dai, Tomory Dodge, Roy Dowell, June Edmonds, Sharon Ellis, Edie Fake, Amir Fallah, Asad Faulwell, Patricia Fernández, Terri Friedman, Ishi Glinsky, Valerie Green, Mark Steven Greenfield, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Sherin Guirguis, Channing Hansen, Zach Harris, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Jim Isermann, Soo Kim, Ahree Lee, Emily Marchand, Allison Miller, Dianna Molzan, Jaime Muñoz, Milena Muzquiz, Elyse Pignolet, Antonio Adriano Puleo, Caris Reid, Ana Rodriguez, Aili Schmeltz, Mindy Shapero, Brooklin A. Soumahoro, Jen Stark, Astri Swendsrud, Mark Dean Veca, and Bari Ziperstein.

“Interlaced: Animation and Textiles” exhibition /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

“Interlaced: Animation and Textiles” (with catalog)

Govett Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Gallery

New Plymouth, New Zealand

Dec 7, 2024 - April 27, 2025

Spanning the gallery and cinema spaces of the Len Lye Centre, Interlaced brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile materials and patterns alongside fiber works inspired by visual transformations made possible by animation.

Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries. By braiding together contemporary animation and textile art, Interlaced highlights the influence of textile history and culture on artisanal media production.

The work of renowned experimental filmmaker Len Lye (1901-1980) plays an important connective role in the exhibition. Interlaced makes a compelling case for the influence of Pacific tapa design and British textile production on Lye’s innovative animation techniques. Nesting Len Lye’s animated films in a broader field of analogue and digital media, Interlaced explores the enduring capacity of textile forms to make visible animating forces and to reanimate intergenerational cultural memory.

"Later in Life" at Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

My new piece “Later in Life” is now on view at Skirball Cultural Center through next spring, 2025.

“Later in Life,” 2024
8 channel 4K video, 33:21 min, color, sound.

ABOUT: Visual artist and filmmaker Sabrina Gschwandtner’s multi-screen video installation presents six Los Angeles adults who reflect upon their B’nai Mitzvah. “Later in Life” asks what it means to embark upon a Jewish coming of age ritual - traditionally performed at age 13 - as an adult.
Gschwandtner, who is both one of the subjects featured in the work and its director, composed the 8 channel video from personal stories and footage of local Los Angeles synagogue architecture and design, revealing the diverse nature of contemporary Jewish experience.

Featuring: Ya’akov Ronnie Britton, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Geoff Martin, Shanti Reinhardt, Joyce Rubin, and Joey Soloway.

Director: Sabrina Gschwandtner
Producers: Sabrina Gschwandtner, Jason Spingarn-Koff
Editor: Kevin Jones
Director of Photography: Jenni Morello
Assistant Editor: Talia Mindich
Assistant Camera: Lea Salanon
Sound: Omar Barraza
Gaffer: Trey Betts
PA: Gabi Marler
Hair & makeup: Nichole Servin
Colorist: Jamie LeJeune
Sound mix: IMRSV

Archival footage and photography: Liz Collins, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Shanti Reinhardt, Joey Soloway, Wilshire Boulevard Temple Los Angeles

Additional participants: Debra Azar, Rabbi Mari Chernow, Rabbi Calvin Dox-DaCosta, Sally Dworsky, Rina Etkes, Cantorial Soloist Shelly Fox, Rabbi Susan Goldberg, Cantor Don Gurney, Ari Herstand, Jul Vann Levine, Rabbi Susan Nanus, Duvid Swirsky

Special thanks: Erin Wright