Toward the Then and There
Public Art Installation
King Plaza, Palo Alto
Originally created for the King Artist Residency at Palo Alto’s King Plaza, Toward the Then and There is an iterative, traveling monument that documents local LGBTQ+ histories excluded from traditional civic spaces. The installation features a retrofitted payphone—once a critical piece of infrastructure for queer connection—surrounded by a spiral path of polished stainless steel etched with gestural drawings of anonymous local community members.
Designed to adapt and evolve wherever it lands, the installation transforms based on the city it inhabits. Lifting the receiver reveals an oral archive of testimonies from local trans and queer residents sharing their lived experiences.
Inspired by José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queerness as a horizon beyond the "here and now," the work serves as a traveling sanctuary and mirror. By updating its audio component to center local trans voices at every stop, Toward the Then and There invites communities to rewrite collective memory and reimagine whose histories are monumentalized in civic space.
Soft Portals
Two-person Exhibition &
Curated Group show
120710 Gallery, Berkeley
Curated by HRT Studio at 120710 Gallery, Soft Portals is an evolving exhibition that conceptualizes the portal as a site of memory, transformation, and community wisdom. The project debuted as a two-person show by Aleo Landeta and Kit Robbins before transforming into a sprawling group exhibition featuring over 20 trans and gender-nonconforming artists from across North America.
The works utilize a diverse material language—from cornhusks and slime molds to crane hooks and chain-link fences—to mark thresholds where identity refuses to remain static. Spanning painting, sculpture, and multimedia, these artists excavate inherited histories of ballroom culture, protest, and ancestral lands, holding them alongside the resilient realities of the contemporary body.
By shifting from an intimate duo to a collective archive, Soft Portals collapses the boundaries between personal narrative and communal legacy. The exhibition serves as a sanctuary for transformation, inviting viewers to engage with the radical possibilities of crossing into new, self-determined futures together.
