Tuesday, May 5, 2026 at 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
ICA LA, Los Angeles
Join us at ICA LA for a Los Angeles-based author talk, presented in partnership with The American LGBTQ+ Museum’s Lavender Literary Society book club, featuring the editors of ***Trans History in 99 Objects*** (**David Evans Frantz**, **Christina Linden**, and **Chris E. Vargas**), a groundbreaking publication from the **Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art** (MOTHA). The book brings together a constellation of artifacts, artworks, and archival materials to illuminate the expansive, often underrecognized histories of trans life across time and place. Through 99 carefully curated objects—ranging from personal ephemera to cultural touchstones—Frantz, Linden, and Vargas trace narratives of resilience, creativity, resistance, and community, challenging linear understandings of history and instead offering a richly layered, trans-centered approach to storytelling that foregrounds lived experience and collective memory. This conversation invites audiences to engage with the ways trans histories are preserved, interpreted, and activated in contemporary contexts. Together, we’ll explore how *Trans History in 99 Objects* expands the archive, honors trans voices, and reimagines the possibilities of historical storytelling through material culture. This program is realized in conjunction with Vargas’ *Reading is Transcendental* on view in the ICA LA bathrooms and produced as part of the 2024 ***[Scientia Sexualis](https://www.theicala.org/en/exhibitions/137-scientia-sexualis)*** exhibition, co-curated by Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro. *Reading is Transcendental* transforms what is often an overdetermined site of violent surveillance and legislative transphobia into an intergenerational reading room. The wallpaper represents the real-life bookshelves of Vargas’s community, with titles that convey both the wide radius of trans literature and the problem of categorization at large, nodding to the thorny task of unmaking a canon.