Queer Arts Featured is proud to present No One Way: Transmasc Art as Activism in the Bay Area, a group exhibition bringing together photography and paintings that honor transmen and transmasculine non-binary artists and activists whose lives and work have helped shape one of the world’s most vibrant and resilient 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. On view from April 3 through May 31, 2026, the exhibition is curated by Queer Arts Featured and made possible through partnership with the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District.

No One Way takes its name from a truth that trans people have always known and lived: there is no single story, no prescribed path, no one way to inhabit a body, a community, or a life. Trans people have existed across every culture and every era of human history, and the transmasculine community of the Bay Area is no exception — they have been here building, creating, and sustaining this place for generations. This exhibition introduces visitors to four artists who celebrate themselves and their community, on their own terms. Together, their works affirm that visibility is not merely survival — it is art, expressed boldly, tenderly, and defiantly in a culture that attacks and seeks to deny their existence.

The exhibition is anchored by a work from Catherine Opie, one of the most celebrated photographers working in America today, featuring Bay Area icon and Transgender Film Festival co-founder Christopher Lee. Opie’s practice has long stood as a testament to the dignity and complexity of lives lived fully and authentically, and her presence in this exhibition grounds No One Way in a rich, decades-long tradition of Bay Area queer visual culture.

Alongside Opie, the exhibition presents recent work by Marcel Pardo Ariza, a San Francisco-based artist and activist whose photography centers trans bodies with extraordinary intimacy and political clarity. Pardo Ariza’s work invites us to look carefully at those who have been rendered invisible — and to reckon honestly with what that invisibility costs us all.

Luka Amaru Fernández brings a painterly vision that is lyrical, layered, and deeply felt — work that holds complexity without demanding resolution. Rooted in his own experience of beautiful ambiguity in racial and gender identity, his practice weaves together fantastical landscapes, magical realism, luminous color, and spiritual imagery to illuminate a nuanced, tangled, and deeply personal relationship to selfhood and belonging. 

Éamon McGivern uses oil paint to document and reimagine transmasculine and queer experience with warmth and formal intelligence. His works in this exhibition, commissioned by The Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, honor four local transmasc heroes who create change in their own right. The work reaches toward community — bridging past and present, building continuity across queer generations. Together, Fernández and McGivern represent the next wave of Bay Area queer art, and Queer Arts Featured is honored to share their work with the community that shaped them.

“This exhibition is in reverence of the transmasc people of the Bay Area. These artists — celebrated and emerging alike — remind us that transmasculine lives have always been woven into the fabric of this place. No One Way is about making that visible, making it felt, and celebrating those who have carved the path and continue the work. This show declares there is no one answer when it comes to inhabiting a body or championing a community, and there never has been.”

— Devlin Shand, Queer Arts Featured

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Catherine Opie is a celebrated American photographer known for her portraiture and documentary work exploring queer identity, community, and the American landscape. Her work is held in major museum collections worldwide.

Marcel Pardo Ariza is a Bay Area-based artist and activist whose interdisciplinary practice centers trans and queer community. Their work has been exhibited widely and is deeply rooted in Bay Area LGBTQ+ culture.

Luka Amaru Fernández is a San Francisco-based painter and designer whose luminous, emotionally resonant work blends personal and queer experience with cultural identity through abstraction and figuration.

Éamon McGivern is a painter based in the San Francisco Bay Area. When he is not making art or working his day job as a front line worker at a shelter for unhoused queer people he is practicing astrology, massage therapy (CMT Licensed), and magic. He has a pisces stellium so is pretty sure that art, magic, healing and community work are all connected anyways.