Opening Reception: Matter of Self

Around Valentine’s Day, love is often flattened—romanticized, commercialized, made consumable. This exhibition proposes a different approach: love as something learned, practiced, and ongoing, rather than resolved.

Join us for the opening of Matter of Self, featuring work by QTBIPOC installation artists and poets exploring self-love as a community practice. The show centers work that reflects on how people learn to care for themselves over time, and how that learning is shaped not only by proximity to others, but by social, cultural, and structural conditions.

We explicitly recognize that queer, trans, and BIPOC artists navigate self-love within systems that regularly attempt to make us smaller—through erasure, regulation, misrepresentation, or harm. For many, self-regard is not a neutral or purely internal act, but one shaped by safety, survival, resistance, and collective care. This exhibition makes space for those realities without requiring explanation or resolution.

Doors open at 5pm. Makers market in the back from 5–8pm.

Matter of Self is curated by Lenin Arguelles and Rya Wu.