Photos courtesy of GLBT Historical Society
Marking Transgender History Month is the latest exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Where We Made Room, a solo exhibition and archival installation by artist Aleo Landeta, explores the queer and trans home as a space carved out, imagined, and fought for. Drawing on the society’s archives, Landeta layers large-scale cyanotypes on silk with hand-drawn interiors based on the homes of Bay Area queer and trans elders, including Lou Sullivan, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, and Victoria Fernandez (aka Vicki Starr).
The show brings together archival images of domestic life, personal photographs, original drawings, and a listening station where visitors can record their own memories of home, creating a living archive where intergenerational memory becomes a form of resistance.
“Aleo is a talented, multifaceted, emerging Bay Area artist whose commitment to portraying queer and trans stories through art provides new ways of telling our histories, and offers us a blueprint for imagining the future,” says Elena Gross, Director of Exhibitions & Public Programs for the Society. “This exhibition is a reminder that we are all living and making history every day. The everyday, the small, the mundane is also history. Who knows what will be important to someone 20, 30, 40 years from now? My hope is that people leave with a greater appreciation for their own homes, for their chosen or birth families, and for what it means to take care of one another.”
Where We Made Room is now on view at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Come experience it for yourself, and add your own memory of home to the living archive. Plan your visit at https://www.glbthistory.org/room
About the Artist
Aleo Landeta (they/them) is a trans and Latine visual artist and educator based in Oakland whose practice spans drawing, painting, installation, and public programming. Their work centers queer joy as liberation, drawing from lived experience and the communities that have held space for them to live authentically. They have been exhibited at MACLA, Bedford Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, and Jonathan Carver Moore, among others, with work held in the permanent collection of the Bakersfield Museum of Art.
Learn more about their work at https://aleolandeta.com/
Community Treasures From the GLBT Historical Society Archives
Published on August 13, 2026
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