Hold Your Power
Elena De La Paz & Jake Maynard
September 13, 2025
The exhibition, Hold Your Power: What We Could Build from the Ashes, was a collaborative two-person show by artists and community organizers, Elena de la Paz and Jake Maynard. Active throughout the community, Elena and Jake use skills and knowledge they’ve developed through a personal and constructive relationship with the Reno community and many mutual aid initiatives. They channel these experiences into their artistic practices, working primarily in photography and collage.
Their pieces showed people both thriving and resisting, and through this, they hope to inspire people to think of what’s possible if we work together, as well as internalize the juxtaposition of the interconnectedness between these two themes. “We also hope to inspire people to find the power within themselves through their own experiences and struggles and to envision a better world within our community and beyond.”
