“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.