The Artwork
If These Walls Could Talk…
2026
Text engraved in bronze
The Music Center
April 26 – May 24, 2026
A restroom is a small room with a lock. A mirror. A moment alone.
It is also civic infrastructure—a threshold between public and private life. For trans and gender-expansive people, this ordinary space can carry extraordinary weight.
If These Stalls Could Talk… casts restroom stall doors in bronze and engraves them with poetry by trans and queer writers. A material historically reserved for permanence, authority, and memorialization is applied at human scale, transforming a politicized site into an archive of lived experience.
In recent years, restrooms have become symbolic terrain in debates about gender and belonging. The engraved texts offer care, reflection, and quiet courage, reminding us that dignity is infrastructure—something lived, practiced, and shared.
These poems invite pause not as hesitation, but as comfort. They honor the ordinary passage through a public space, the small acts of survival, and the human capacity to witness and hold one another in safety.
Brian Sonia-Wallace is a poet, educator, and public artist based in Los Angeles. Former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, he is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (HarperCollins) and Maze Mouth. His work centers on creating art that bridges civic space, public memory, and lived experience, often collaborating with LGBTQ+ communities, youth, and elders to amplify voices that are rarely heard. Sonia-Wallace’s practice spans performance, writing, and participatory public projects that transform everyday spaces into sites of reflection, care, and dialogue. With a focus on intimacy and monumentality, he explores how poetry can function as infrastructure—shaping how we move through, inhabit, and witness the city. His projects have been presented in theaters, galleries, and public spaces across Los Angeles, always seeking to make the ordinary extraordinary, and to honor dignity as both a lived experience and a shared civic value.