Art-Exhibitions-Past

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...

Afro-Atlantic Histories charts the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies in the African diaspora. Through a series of dialogues across time, the exhibition features artworks produced in Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the last four centuries to reexamine—from a global perspective—histories and stories of enslavement, resilience, and the struggle for liberation.

The exhibition is organized around six groupings: Maps and Margins, Enslavements and Emancipations, Everyday Lives, Rites and Rhythms...

Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany explores the shared subjects and visual strategies of two key moments in 20th-century political printmaking: the revival of German Expressionist graphics in response to a nationwide revolution in 1918, and the formation of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Print Workshop) in Mexico City in the late 1930s. Although rooted in distinct social and historical contexts, artists in both countries responded to...

In the work of American artist Sam Francis (1923–1994), Western and Eastern aesthetics engage in a profound intercultural dialogue. Francis first traveled to Japan in 1957, developing a lifelong affinity for Japanese art and culture that influenced his work. His expressive handling of negative space shared pictorial and philosophical affinities with aspects of East Asian aesthetics, particularly the Japanese concept of ma, the dynamic between form and non-form. With over...

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 explores how the rise of computer technology, together with its emergence in popular consciousness, impacted the making of art in the age of the mainframe. International and interdisciplinary in scope, Coded examines the origins of what we now call digital art, featuring artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers working directly with computers as well as those using algorithms and other systems to produce...

Since the mid-20th century, California has been a beacon of both inventive design and political activism. Exploring the intersection of these realms, this exhibition uses case studies from LACMA’s collection to demonstrate how designers and artists championed civil rights, opposed wars and injustice, and pressed for change. Skilled communicators by profession, they distilled complex issues into eye-catching images, often appropriating commercial art techniques—from newspaper broadsheets to screen prints to digital...

In 1938 in New Mexico, a loose configuration of artists came together to form the Transcendental Painting Group. Led by New Mexico painters Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, and joined by painters such as Agnes Pelton and Lawren Harris, the members of the group sought to explore spiritually heightened abstraction by employing free-wheeling symbols and imagery drawn from the collective unconscious. According to their manifesto they strove "to carry painting...

This presentation of photographs made by contemporary lens-based artists from LACMA’s collection encompasses a range of concepts and approaches to visualizing the country-state of California (aka Kali Forno, Califia, Alta California). Each photographer attempts to blur, redefine, or break down the boundaries of established tropes that have, for so long, defined this place on the edge of the country. Whether embracing or contesting the myths and iconographies created by a...

One of the earliest and best-preserved areas of artistic production across the globe, ceramics remain a vital field of expression and experimentation into the present. Conversing in Clay: Ceramics from the LACMA Collection explores the medium through 14 case studies, placing historical works in visual dialogue with contemporary examples to illuminate symbolic meanings, technical achievements, and resonances throughout time. The exhibition examines how artists working today relate to international artistic...

The Five Directions: Lacquer Through East Asia traces the flow of materials and ideas throughout the region. Lacquer, a natural polymer derived from tree sap, was a widely circulated and prized commodity. Stylistic variations set regions apart. Still, the dynamic flow of techniques, materials, and visual vocabularies continued uninterrupted even during times of relative isolationism. Drawing inspiration from a spatial conception where North, South, East, and West are joined by...

Art has always represented shifting ideals of the beautiful, but for just as long it has explored the opposite: the ugly, the strange, and the gruesome. This is the realm of the grotesque. The grotesque is a persistent undercurrent in German art of the early 20th century. Its popularity was connected to contemporary events, as artists confronted the upheavals of modern life and the horrors of World War I. 

This...

A groundbreaking show that is the first of its kind in the West, The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art covers the years 1897 to 1965, loosely organized chronologically, stylistically, and conceptually. The second of three major Korean art exhibitions of Hyundai Motor’s Korean Art Scholarship initiative, The Space Between spans the arc of European-influenced art via Japan in the Korean Empire (1897–1910) and colonial period (1910–45), explores American...

Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890–1980 is the first exhibition to examine the extensive design exchanges between the United States and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) during the 20th century. Serving as a corrective to the dominant narrative of central European émigrés shaping modern American design culture, the exhibition will present a new international story, featuring accounts of Scandinavian designers who immigrated to the United...

Park Dae Sung was born in 1945, the official end of both the Japanese colonization of Korea and WWII. In 1950, during the Korean War, his parents were killed by Communist soldiers, and he found solace in painting. Self-taught, Park has spent time in China, walked the Silk Road, and searched for the meaning of hanja (Chinese characters), the aesthetic foundation of his calligraphy and paintings.

Park Dae Sung: Virtuous...

Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising traces the artistic manipulation of advertising, the most powerful, mainstream visual language. Since the 1970s, creative innovations led to dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression, as photo-based artists reworked advertising strategies to challenge the increased commodification of daily life, and later to appropriate the command these images have over the viewer/consumer. By exploiting advertising’s visual vocabulary and...

Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800 is the first exhibition of LACMA’s notable holdings of Spanish American art. Following the arrival of the Spaniards in the Americas in the 15th century, the region developed complex artistic traditions that drew on Indigenous, European, Asian, and African art. The Spanish conquest of the Philippines in 1565 inaugurated a commercial route that connected Asia, Europe, and the Americas....

One of the most significant contributors to fashion between 1990 and 2010, Lee Alexander McQueen (London, 1969–2010) was both a conceptual and technical virtuoso. His critically acclaimed collections synthesized the designer’s proficiency in tailoring and dressmaking with both encyclopedic and autobiographical references that spanned time, geography, media, and technology. The first McQueen exhibition on the West Coast, Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse contextualizes the designer’s imaginative work within a...

Comprising approximately 400 works, including an unprecedented number of loans from the Museo del Oro in Bogota, this groundbreaking exhibition presents the diversity and materiality of ancient Colombian cultures and reframes how we approach ancient Colombian art. With the European conquest, Indigenous cultures and knowledge, based on millennia of intellectual efforts, were disregarded as crude superstition. The Portable Universe is designed to recapture some of that knowledge and to envelop the...

Revealing insights about family life and the quotidian in the 21st century, Family Album explores the work of artists of color who examine themselves and history through the visual language of family photographs. The exhibition presents new work by Dannielle Bowman and Janna Ireland among contemporaries including Germane Barnes, Mark Bradford, Micaiah Carter, Tony Cokes, Sandra de la Loza, Mercedes Dorame, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Genevieve Gaignard, Leslie Hewitt, Deana Lawson...

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. is a major exhibition devoted to the work of Barbara Kruger, one of the most significant and visible artists of our time. Spanning four decades, this exhibition is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Kruger’s work in 20 years; it spans her single-channel videos from the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, and...

Placing cinema in the context of 19th-century Parisian visual culture, City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907 explores how film emerged amid a wave of social, political, artistic, and technological developments. The exhibition brings together paintings, sculpture, posters, prints, photography, and film to reflect the range of artistic experiments that culminated in cinema as a mass medium. The story begins on the streets of Paris, where a diverse populace formed a collective...

LACMA marks the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City) with Mixpantli: Space, Time, and the Indigenous Origins of Mexico. This exhibition subverts the traditional narrative of conquest by centering the creative resilience of Indigenous artists, mapmakers, and storytellers who forged new futures and made their world anew through artistic practice. Nahua scribes gave the name mixpantli, or “banner of clouds,” to the...

Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes showcases the lasting impact of Indigenous creative resilience, connecting the vibrant artistic traditions of the past and the present, of Los Angeles and Mexico. This exhibition features the works of contemporary artists and mapmakers who draw on Indigenous cartographic and artistic histories to challenge dominant narratives about place and belonging. Artworks include Mariana Castillo Deball’s Vista de Ojos (2014), a wooden pavement etched with the oldest map...

In Golden Hour, over 70 artists and three photography collectives offer an aesthetic approach to understanding the complexities and histories of California. These images, gathered from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have come to define the myths, iconographies, and realities of this unique state. Pairing masters of photography with experimental practitioners in a range of lens-based media that includes photo sculpture, vernacular, and video...