Nina Katz's monumental trans portraits return for SF Pride at Asian Art Museum

Artist Nina Katz created nine 65×45-inch oil-on-wood-panel portraits of transgender people for her series 'larger than life: Portraits of Transgender People,' first exhibited in 2020 for only two weeks due to COVID-19. The series was a personal response to anti-trans rhetoric during the first Trump administration, when her trans child was 16. Katz interviewed and photographed each subject, capturing moments of vulnerability or ease, and included audio recordings of their voices played beside each painting. The work is now being shown at the 2026 SF Pride Annual VIP Party at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco on June 28, 2026. Katz, who trained at the San Francisco Art Institute after a career in nursing, began her portrait practice in 2009 by sketching obituaries from The New York Times. She does not consider the paintings political but personal, aiming to humanize trans people for audiences who may never have met one. The second Trump administration has introduced executive orders defining sex in binary terms, limiting gender-affirming care, and a Supreme Court decision on passport policies, alongside a Kansas law revoking driver's licenses of hundreds of trans people.