'Hold My Hand in Yours' featuring Kelly Akashi at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, California, USA

29 August 2025

From 6 September, 2025 – 29 March, 2026, The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art presents Hold My Hand in Yours featuring Kelly Akashi. Hold My Hand in Yours is a group exhibition that explores the hand as a powerful symbol in contemporary art. Across painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, video, installation, and social practice, the artists in this exhibition consider the hand not only as a site of artistic production, but as an agent of connection, memory, labor, resistance, and care.

At the heart of the show is a deep attention to caregiving and interdependence—emotional, physical, and political. Other artists approach the hand as a recorder of memory, a witness to history, or an index of presence, while a final set of works use the hand to stand in for the body. Hold My Hand in Yours is a meditation on the radical potential of the hand as a symbol of closeness and shared experience. In an era defined by digital distance and social fragmentation, the artists return us to profound possibilities of embodied connection.

Kelly Akashi’s presents Witness (Highview, Altadena), 2025, a bronze hand, made in the wake of the fire that claimed her home and studio, is the latest in a long-running series of sculptures of her own hand, each recording the subtle changes the body experiences over time.

Explore via The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art.

Image: Kelly Akashi, Witness (Highview, Altadena), 2025, Lost-wax and burn-out cast bronze, 30.5 x 10.2 x 22.9 cm, 12 x 4 x 9 in © Kelly Akashi, Courtesy Lisson Gallery