Art-Exhibitions-Ongoing

Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads references a long and ongoing story of cross-cultural exchange and collision between China and the West, beginning with a mid-18th century fountain at Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. The fountain, commissioned by Emperor Qianlong and designed by Jesuit priests promoting Catholicism in China, was used to tell time: 12 zodiac animal sculptures each spouted water for two hours (or one shichen) each...

Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Shafted) features her distinctive use of advertising text and sharp, poetic phrases that criticize consumerism, misogyny, power, and desire. Commissioned by LACMA in 2008, this monumental installation occupies the full elevator shaft of BCAM and utilizes the architecture to a powerful end. While visitors wait for the elevator to arrive—on any of the three floors—they are visually bombarded with messages about consumption and consumerism. Beginning at the...

Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings. According to...

Deep Time Cinematography is a site-specific conceptual artwork by Jonathon Keats that will create a 10-frame zoetrope movie of the Hollywood Hills over the next 10,000 years. The work utilizes a handcrafted pinhole camera, installed on the third-floor escalator landing of BCAM, to capture 10 millennia-spanning portraits of Los Angeles's evolving landscape. Through its radical temporality, Deep Time Cinematography is Keats’s powerful call to the imagination and to action, raising...

Mark Bradford’s 150 Portrait Tone, a mural-size composition that contains elements of both abstraction and realism, is based on an idea for a work that the artist conceived after the fatal shooting of Philando Castile by a police officer in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in July 2016. Castile, a nutrition services supervisor at an elementary school, was shot after being pulled over in his car—an incident that was livestreamed on...

LACMA’s Modern Art collection features primarily European and American art from 1900 to the 1960s, including examples from the museum’s American and Latin American collections. Several galleries are dedicated to the Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection—including concentrations of work by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti—and others are devoted to the museum’s renowned German Expressionist holdings of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. The installation presents Michael McMillen’s immersive environment Central...

Band (2006) may qualify as Richard Serra's magnum opus, representing the fullest expression of the formal vocabulary proffered by his monumental steel arcs and torqued ellipses of the 1980s and 1990s. Among the most formally elegant and technically complex works of Serra's oeuvre, this sculpture took him two-and-a-half years to develop. At 12 feet high and more than 70 feet long, the work is vast even by Serra's monumental standard...

Artist Robert Irwin’s work in the last five decades has investigated perception and the experience of art. With Miracle Mile, Irwin reconsiders the properties of light, material, and color. The site-specific work subtly plays with the architecture in which it is housed and responds to both Wilshire Boulevard (the storied thoroughfare it faces) and Primal Palm Garden (an outdoor installation created by Irwin in 2008). A linear configuration composed...