Art-Exhibitions-Past

Simone Leigh, a traveling exhibition organized by the ICA Boston and co-presented in Los Angeles by LACMA and the California African American Museum, is the first comprehensive survey of the richly layered work of this celebrated artist. LACMA’s presentation features approximately 20 years of Leigh’s production in ceramic, bronze, video, and installation, as well as works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation. Over the past two decades, Leigh has...

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard is the first museum exhibition of L.A.-based and Venezuelan-born artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (b. 1929). Trained in painting, print-making, and sculpture in Venezuela, Chile, and New York, Suarez Frimkess’s most recognized works are made in clay. Spanning over five decades, The Finest Disregard features ceramics, paintings, and drawings, including an important selection of works made collaboratively with her husband, Michael Frimkess. Although her work...

This installation highlights selections from more than 100 artworks acquired in the last five years by LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, which houses a unique collection focused on prints and drawings produced in German-speaking Europe from 1900 to 1933. New Acquisitions to the Rifkind Center reflects the Center’s ongoing engagement with the work of the Expressionist group Die Brücke and with major modern German artists such as Max...

The two-channel film and sculptural installation American Artist: The Monophobic Response documents a meticulously crafted yet poetically altered re-creation of a pivotal 1936 static rocket engine test that initiated the United States' venture into space travel. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, which unfolds in the imagined dystopic year of 2024, American Artist performed and filmed The Monophobic Response in the Mojave Desert in the summer of 2024. Artist’s interpretation...

Ed Ruscha has consistently held up a mirror to American society by transforming some of its defining attributes—from consumer culture and popular entertainment to the ever-changing urban landscape—into the very subject of his art. In 1956, Ruscha left Oklahoma City to study commercial art in Los Angeles, where he drew inspiration from the city’s architectural landscape—parking lots, urban streets, and apartment buildings—and colloquial language.

As his first comprehensive, cross-media retrospective...

The act of coming together to partake of a meal is a practice shared by all cultures. Food defines us—we are what we eat. Dining with the Sultan is the first exhibition to present Islamic art in the context of its associated culinary traditions. It will include some 250 works of art related to the sourcing, preparation, serving, and consumption of food, from 30 public and private collections in...

Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine features Valdez’s oil painting on a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck portraying the forced removal of a predominantly Mexican American community for the construction of Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s. In 2004, Cooder invited Valdez to collaborate and create a painting to align with his album “Chavez Ravine” (2005), a musical interpretation of the neighborhood’s history. Posing a visual contradiction...

For the first time in her practice, Judy Baca transforms a museum into a studio. She and artists from the Social and Public Art Resource Center expand The Great Wall of Los Angeles into the 21st century, painting three sections of the mural at LACMA. LACMA’s exhibition presents murals from the 1960s and 1970s depicting the Chicano Movement, Watts Renaissance, the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement, and archival materials that have never...

Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media explores how the media spectacle in which we live had origins in World War I and the burgeoning mediascape of posters, photography, cinema, illustrated newspapers, and ephemera that made it the first global media war. How did the media and artists imagine a war encompassing the entire world? Combatants included forces from Australia, Canada, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, as well...

Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create augmented reality monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. In consultation with community leaders and historians, the third and final cohort of artists, Victoria Fu, Yassi Mazandi, Rashaad Newsome, Ruben Ortiz Torres, and Alison Saar, use the lens of collective ancestral...

Korean Treasures presents 35 artworks recently donated to LACMA by Drs. Chester and Cameron C. Chang (M.D.), selected from the largest gift of Korean art in the museum’s history. Chester Chang (Chang Jung Ki) was born in Seoul in 1939 and first moved to the United States as a child with his family in 1949, when his father, Chang Chi Whan, was appointed General Secretary to the first Consul General...

Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create augmented reality monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. In consultation with community leaders and historians, the second cohort of artists, Judy Baca, Sandra de la Loza, and Kang Seung Lee, examine changing landscapes and memory as a way to connect the past and the...

A kinetic sculptural work by Yassi Mazandi, Language of the Birds takes its name and theme from an epic 12th-century Persian poem by Farid al-Din ‘Attar, a parable about a mystical quest for God, a spiritual home, or even our own highest good. The mission is undertaken by 100 birds seeking a worldly ruler—the mythical Simurgh. Many birds perish along the way until 30 remain, only to realize they themselves...

World War I, dubbed the “Great War” for its unprecedented human and geographic scale, was fought on both sides by armies of millions of citizen soldiers, including many artists. Some became official war artists; others served on the front lines and made the war a subject of their art. For German artists, the print portfolio was one of the most popular formats for depicting the war and its aftermath. Artists...

This new initiative uses augmented reality to explore monuments and murals, representation, and history. Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create virtual monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. In consultation with community leaders and historians, the first cohort of artists, Mercedes Dorame, I.R. Bach, Glenn Kaino, Ruben Ochoa...

Filled with over 300 objects including paintings, prints and sculptures, as well as gems, shells, and taxidermy, World Made Wondrous recreates a fictive 17th-century Dutch collector’s cabinet in order to examine the political and colonial histories of European collecting practices in the 17th century. As Europeans assembled their cabinets, they ordered the world in deliberate ways, asserting judgments and hierarchies on the value of natural materials, forms of labor, forms...

Stone is the most vivid and enduring material in which to find shapes and marks that look like something else. Making sense of such enigmatic visual phenomena, including the moon, clouds, and inkblots, has fascinated makers and viewers of art throughout time. Stone, especially vividly colored and richly patterned stone, is an impressive medium because the right stone can be difficult to source and carve. Eternal Medium: Seeing the World...

As construction continues on LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries, pedestrians on Wilshire Boulevard are able to catch a glimpse of the scaffolding coming down to reveal the beautiful curves of the building’s roof, exhibition level, and sunshade. One of the many noteworthy elements of the museum’s future home for the permanent collection is its use of architectural concrete, which makes up both its structure and aesthetic finish. We had the opportunity...

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction foregrounds a robust if over-looked strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century. Although at times unevenly weighted, the diverse exchanges, alignments, affiliations, and affinities that have brought these art forms into dialogue constitute an ongoing if intermittent narrative in which...

Matthew Barney’s expansive career began in the early 1990s with significant gallery exhibitions that established his interest in centering the body and performance in his installations and media productions. Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) is a seminal installation from his breakout solo exhibition Facility of DECLINE at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, in 1991. The room-sized sculptural installation features two videos in which Barney performs strenuous acts of athletics with unorthodox...

Artist Selects: Silke Otto-Knapp, The Living We Are Doing, Always Among Others is the first in a series of exchanges between artists and LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Silke Otto-Knapp (1970–2022), a German-born, Los Angeles–based artist, is best known for her monochromatic work in watercolor. For this project, on view in LACMA’s Modern Art Galleries, she selected works that appealed to her among the collection’s thousands of prints...

Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection explores the art of Light and Space as well as related works with highly polished surfaces often referred to as “finish fetish.” In the 1960s and 1970s, various Southern California artists began to create works that investigate perceptual phenomena: how we come to understand form, volume, presence, and absence through light, seen directly through other materials, reflected, or refracted. Many used newly developed...

This exhibition presents 75 works by women artists who were born or live in what can broadly be termed Islamic societies. Frequently perceived as voiceless and invisible, they are neither. Each through her unique vision is fashioning not only her own definition of self but also helping to redefine and empower women everywhere and to challenge still-persistent stereotypes. Their art depicts a breadth of inventively and often ideologically conceived women’s...

New Abstracts showcases an expansive range of practices constituting abstract art today. Despite strong counter currents in the contemporary art world, such as the resurgence of figurative painting, innovations in augmented reality, and the development of NFTs, abstraction continues to offer rich possibilities for innovation and introspection. Many artists working with abstract vocabularies today interrogate not only the possibilities of color, material, gesture, and form, but also the potential for...