This summer time, Los Angeles artwork establishments provide each sorely wanted aesthetic escapes and deep dives into up to date points. There are a number of career-ranging surveys and historic reassessments, for one, together with a have a look at Barbara T. Smith’s early Xerox work made on a rented copy machine in her front room; an exhibition on the Hammer masking the temporary however sensible profession of late painter Noah Davis; and a Nancy Buchanan retrospective highlighting her multifaceted artwork apply alongside her dedication to schooling and collaboration. New work by Jeffrey Gibson on the Broad, Will Rawls on the ICA LA, and Karl Haendel on the Weisman Museum confront numerous dominant narratives, providing inclusive and disruptive multiplicities of voices. In the meantime, two very completely different reveals illustrate the function of artwork to talk to pressing wants and present occasions: a bunch exhibition on the California African American Museum centered on the legacy of Altadena’s Black neighborhood and its collective loss on account of the current Eaton Fireplace, and a Skirball present devoted to comic-book artist Jack Kirby, who broadened the medium to handle real-world challenges outdoors of its fantastical storylines. Collectively, these exhibitions underscore the function of the museum as each cultural refuge and neighborhood useful resource.
Barbara T. Smith: Xerox 914
Marciano Artwork Basis, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los AngelesThrough July 5
Barbara T. Smith, “Just Plain Facts” (1966–67), Xerox on paper (picture courtesy the artist, the Field, Los Angeles, and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York)
At 94 years previous, Barbara T. Smith is a pioneering determine in West Coast efficiency artwork whose multi-disciplinary apply is outlined by experimentation, incorporating portray, set up, video, and the early web. In 1966, earlier than garnering recognition for her efficiency works, she leased a Xerox 914 photocopier and positioned it within the eating room of her Pasadena residence. Over the course of eight months, she created hundreds of reproductions by copying household photographs, autobiographical ephemera, and her nude physique, which she laid straight onto the machine’s glass plate. The ensuing works — which vary from two-dimensional prints to sculptural constructions and artists’ books — have interaction with seriality, know-how, unbiased publishing, and feminist artwork, all with an air of expansive curiosity that’s evident all through her six-decade (and counting) profession.
Mom Me Meanly
Chez Max et Dorothea, 2228 West seventh Road, Westlake, Los AngelesThrough July 12
Christina Ballantyne, “No Respite” (2025), oil and pastel on linen (picture courtesy Chez Max et Dorothea)
Binary conceptions of moms as both “good” or “bad” aren’t simply restricted to fairytales. However by contending with the complexities and contradictions of motherhood, Mom Me Meanly counters this false dichotomy. Curated by Lauren Guilford and Shana Hoehn, the exhibition options an intergenerational group of artists who mirror the nurturing, traumatic, beneficiant, and transformative facets of the maternal spectrum. Highlights embrace Alison Saar’s haunting sculpture “Milk Teeth” (2021) depicting a determine gnawing on a toddler’s picket chair, a picture from Ron Athey’s body-modified metamorphosis into the “Venus of Willendorf” (2024), and Dorothea Tanning’s delicate 1965 and ’68 watercolors through which friezes of natural types vigorously writhe and twist.
Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour
Laguna Artwork Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Seashore, CaliforniaThrough July 13
Carole Caroompas, “Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour: Dead or Alive” (2001), acrylic on discovered embroidery on canvas over panel (picture by Eric Stoner, courtesy Laguna Artwork Museum)
Carole Caroompas, who died in 2022, was recognized for her exuberant, layered canvases, through which she pulled from literature, popular culture, and the annals of historical past to subvert gender, energy, and aesthetic hierarchies. Her sequence Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour (1997-2001) reimagines Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights as a rock ‘n’ roll highway journey by media-soaked Americana, pairing the e-book’s male protagonist, Heathcliff, with the titular “Femme Fatale.” Characterised by deep analysis, technical mastery, and an abrasive punk sensibility, Caroompas’s work didn’t match neatly into artwork historic classes, and he or she is barely now receiving deserved recognition.
Karl Haendel: Much less Unhealthy
Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Artwork, Pepperdine College, 24255 Pacific Coast Freeway, Malibu, CaliforniaThrough July 27
Set up view of Karl Haendel: Much less Unhealthy on the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Artwork at Pepperdine College (picture by Joshua Schaedel)
Karl Haendel’s mesmerizing, photo-realistic drawings are located inside a conceptual framework that investigates notions of masculinity, inventive labor, and the perform of pictures in up to date society. Organized in collaboration with the Kimball Artwork Middle in Park Metropolis, Utah, Much less Unhealthy options work from the previous twenty years that attracts on artwork historical past, mass media, literature, and the artist’s personal life, mixing technical mastery with dry wit. The exhibition structure itself highlights playful juxtapositions, permitting viewers to make their very own connections between Haendel’s disparate renderings of picture and textual content.
Imagining Black Diasporas: Twenty first-Century Artwork and Poetics
Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los AngelesThrough July 27
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, “Daylight Studio (0X5A0161)” (2022), inkjet print (picture courtesy the artist, Bortolami Gallery, New York, DOCUMENT, Chicago, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Paris & Zurich)
With work by 60 artists from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and a particular give attention to these based mostly on the West Coast, Imagining Black Diasporas takes an expansive view of up to date Black artwork. Curator Dhyandra Lawson brings collectively the work of established artists, together with Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Glenn Ligon, with that of rising artists and people possible lesser recognized to American audiences, akin to Ibrahim Mahama and Grace Ndiritu. Imagining Black Diasporas showcases the breadth of Pan-African expressions of displacement, resilience, fusion, and reinvention.
Will Rawls: [siccer]
Institute of Up to date Artwork, Los Angeles, 1717 East seventh Road, Downtown, Los AngelesThrough August 31
Set up view of Will Rawls: [siccer] on the Institute of Up to date Artwork, Los Angeles (picture by Jeff McLane, courtesy ICALA)
Taking its identify from the Latin “sic” which designates an error in a citation, Will Rawls’s multi-media set up investigates the way in which that Black folks’s our bodies have been scrutinized, erased, and vilified in each cinema and society at giant. Using dance, stop-motion, and audio, the manufacturing options an all-Black forged whose actions are set towards inexperienced backgrounds referencing the inexperienced screens utilized in movie to make objects, or folks, vanish. [siccer] calls into query subjective attributions of proper and unsuitable, embracing as a substitute the swamplands of indeterminacy.
Noah Davis
Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los AngelesJune 8–August 31
Noah Davis, “1975 (8)” (2013), oil on canvas in artist’s body (picture by Kerry McFate, courtesy the Property of Noah Davis and David Zwirner)
In his temporary profession, the late artist Noah Davis established himself as a major voice in up to date American portray, who was capable of impart a way of gravitas and intimacy to scenes of the on a regular basis. Drawing on a spread of visible supply materials, together with discovered images, household archives, and media pictures, Davis’s work mirror a thematic variety, from African-American historical past and illustration to up to date tradition and mythological narratives. This primary institutional survey of his work contains greater than 50 work created between 2007 and 2015, the yr he handed away from a uncommon type of most cancers on the age of 32.
Francis Picabia: Femmes
Michael Werner Gallery, 417 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CaliforniaThrough August
Francis Picabia, “Untitled” (c. 1936–37), oil on wooden (© The property of Francis Picabia; picture courtesy Michael Werner Gallery)
Francis Picabia is now related primarily with the Dada motion, however he was one thing of a modernist chameleon, experimenting with Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, and later Surrealism, which he turned to after denouncing Dada in 1921. Femmes spans the Nineteen Twenties to ’50s, the final three a long time of this shape-shifting artist’s life, showcasing his fixed reinvention by specializing in one topic: girls. The exhibition contains examples from his frantic, dense Monster work of the mid-Nineteen Twenties, his ethereal, layered Transparencies sequence from the top of the identical decade, and later works that appropriated pin-up pictures from Nineteen Fifties popular culture.
Honestly, Nancy Buchanan
The Brick, 518 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los AngelesJune 22–September 20
Nonetheless from Nancy Buchanan, “These Creatures” (1979), single-channel video, length: 1 minute (picture courtesy the artist)
Honestly, Nancy Buchanan is the primary full-career retrospective of this influential LA-based artist, masking her wide-ranging apply of efficiency, video, digital artwork, collage, and set up, in addition to her long-time function as an educator on the California Institute of the Arts. Organized by Catherine Taft and artist Laura Owens, Buchanan’s former scholar, the exhibition showcases her experiments with nascent applied sciences, efficiency documentation from the Seventies and ’80s, and her often-overlooked lifelong drawing apply, and can function a realization of her 1973 conceptual work “Hair Room” in addition to a brand new collaboration between Buchanan and Owens. Accompanying packages embrace video screenings, an occasion co-presented with the Efficiency Artwork Museum, and a restaging of Buchanan’s 1974 efficiency work “Rock ’n’ Roll” by Slauson Malone 1 (Jasper Marsalis) on the final day of the exhibition.
Jeffrey Gibson: the house through which to position me
The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los AngelesThrough September 28
Set up view of Jeffrey Gibson: the house through which to position me on the Broad (picture by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy the Broad)
Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s dazzlingly vibrant works are each celebratory and mournful, melding Indigenous artwork traditions, geometric abstraction, and narratives of oppression and resistance. First offered final yr on the sixtieth Venice Biennale, the place Gibson was the primary Indigenous solo artist to signify america, the house through which to position me contains painted and beaded wall works and sculptures that includes excepts from authorized texts, quotes, and track lyrics referring to America’s historical past of racism and repression, in addition to the perseverance and solidarity amongst folks of colour and LGBTQ+ communities. To not be missed is the electrifying video “She Never Dances Alone” (2019), through which Sarah Ortegon HighWalking (Japanese Shoshone and Northern Arapaho) performs conventional jingle dancing set to a thumping soundtrack by First Nations musical group the Halluci Nation, an ebullient assertion of this once-banned artwork type.
Luchita Hurtado: Yo Soy
Hauser & Wirth, 901 East third Road, Downtown, Los AngelesJune 29–October 5
Luchita Hurtado, “Self Portrait” (1973), oil on canvas and thread, 3 elements (© The Property of Luchita Hurtado; picture by Jeff McLane, courtesy the Property of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth)
Yo Soy presents works from an important interval within the prolific profession of the late Venezuelan-born, LA-based artist Luchita Hurtado. The exhibition is centered round Hurtado’s 1974 solo present on the Girl’s Constructing, a traditionally important feminist arts house and gallery in LA, which featured her Linear Language sequence (1972–74). Hurtado started by portray phrases and phrases onto canvases, which she then lower up and restitched to obscure the textual content however create luminous, vibrating geometric abstractions within the course of. Accompanying these work, lots of which have by no means been exhibited earlier than, will probably be archival materials together with documentation and ephemera from the Girl’s Constructing, cooperatively run Womanspace Gallery, and the Los Angeles Council of Girls Artists, of which Hurtado was a founding member.
Ode to ’Dena: Black Creative Legacies of Altadena
California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los AngelesThrough October 12
Keni “Arts” Davis, “Triangle Square” (2018), watercolor (picture courtesy the artist)
The horrific wildfires that swept by a part of Los Angeles earlier this yr had been particularly devastating to the neighborhood of Altadena in Northeast LA, which misplaced practically 10,000 constructions — 6,000 of these properties — to the Eaton Fireplace. Altadena is characterised by an particularly racially various inhabitants, with a major Black neighborhood anchored by multigenerational households who’ve lived there for many years. Ode to ’Dena pays tribute to this neighborhood, together with scores of Black artists who’ve referred to as the world residence, by recognizing the tragedy of the present second in addition to the potential for rebirth. Curated by Dominique Clayton, founding father of Dominique Gallery, the present options work by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Kenturah Davis, Mark Steven Greenfield, Dominique Moody, John Outterbridge, Martine Syms, Charles White, and lots of extra.
Black Cowboys: An American Story
Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Means, Griffith Park, Los AngelesJune 14–January 4, 2026
Compton Cowboy Keenan Abercrombia (“Chef Kee”) on the Compton Cowboy Ranch (picture courtesy Compton Cowboys)
Black Cowboys: An American Story gives a corrective to the historic erasure of African-American communities within the American West, that includes objects, ephemera, images, and video that set the document straight, and spotlight how the Black cowboy custom remains to be alive and nicely. Initially organized by the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas, the Autry’s staging of the exhibition provides a bit on California, with figures like Charlie Sampson, the primary African-American individual to win a world championship in skilled rodeo; Black calvary troops often known as Buffalo Troopers; and cinematic portrayals from The Bull-Dogger (1922) to The More durable They Fall (2021).
MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi
Museum of Up to date Artwork, 250 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los AngelesJune 29–March 1, 2026
Takako Yamaguchi, “Stitch” (2023), oil and metallic leaf on canvas (picture by Gene Ogami, courtesy the artist, Ortuzar, New York, and as-is.la, Los Angeles)
Takako Yamaguchi’s enigmatic work draw on a multiplicity of sources, together with Japanese nihonga work, Artwork Nouveau patterns, European Renaissance motifs, and hard-edge abstraction. She has been mining this postmodern vein for the reason that early Seventies when she moved from Japan to the US, the place she has lived ever since. This exhibition, which marks the artist’s first solo US museum present, is a part of the MOCA Focus sequence and highlights new work, introducing the most recent developments in her fruitful appropriative methods.
Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity
Skirball Cultural Middle, 2701 North Sepulveda Boulevard, Brentwood, Los AngelesThrough March 1, 2026
“Captain America Comics #1” (1940), cowl artwork by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (© Marvel; picture courtesy Skirball Cultural Middle)
Late artist Jack Kirby had a hand in creating among the most iconic comic-book characters of all time: Captain America, the Implausible 4, the X-Males, Black Panther, and extra. He expanded the concept of what comedian books could possibly be and the tales they might inform, grappling with present problems with the day akin to social justice, illustration, and battle inside visionary narratives. Heroes and Humanity traces his six-decade profession, from his childhood as a first-generation Jewish American child named Jacob Kurtzberg rising up on New York’s Decrease East Facet within the Nineteen Twenties and ’30s to his distinguished inventive roles at each Marvel and DC, in addition to the posthumous movie diversifications of his work that carry his legacy ahead.
