Art-Exhibitions-Past

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...

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning over two centuries from c. 1800 to the present day, this...

Carmen Herrera’s Estructura Verde is based on a simple geometric conceit: a rectangular form is cleaved into two L-shaped components (one a perfect right angle, the other irregular) through the simple excision of three narrow, triangular cuts. Initially rendered as an isometric drawing in 1966, and appearing later as the basis for one of Herrera’s iconic Blanco y Verde paintings in 1966–67, the design was eventually realized in three dimensions...

In the Now explores and challenges traditional categories of gender, nation, and photography, featuring works made since 2000 by women artists born or working in Europe. Many artists contend with representations of the body, with individual perspectives on beauty, femininity, objectification, and what it means to be an artist who identifies as a woman today. Though born or based in Europe, these artists may or may not locate their practices...

Artists play a role in defining an era, capturing its mood and energy through beat or brushstroke. Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined brings together an intergenerational group of visual artists including Cecily Brown, Lauren Halsey, Rashid Johnson, Takashi Murakami, and Ed Ruscha into dialogue with iconic musicians from the last three decades including Dr. Dre, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Nine Inch Nails, and Lady Gaga.

To mark the 30th...

From the moment of their unveiling at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in February 2018, the museum’s official portraits of President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama have become iconic. Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald’s portrait of the former First Lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public.
 
This five-city tour will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, High Art Museum...

Beyond the concrete materials of ink and paper, there is an intangible spirit uniting works of East Asian ink painting. But how does the spirit of ink translate to other mediums, global makers, and contemporary times? Comprising photography, sculpture, video—and, of course, painting—Ink Dreams proposes a new view of ink art for the contemporary era, one that incorporates qualities from the ink painting tradition and new adaptations of traditional...

Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography, 1870–1900 offers the first-ever in-depth examination of cabinet cards. Inexpensive and sold by the dozen, cabinet cards were America’s main format for photographic portraiture through the last three decades of the 19th century, just prior to the introduction of the snapshot camera. Earlier, getting a photographic portrait was a formal, rare event; the new format made it commonplace.

This exhibition...

Cauleen Smith is a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. A traveling solo exhibition of film, video, and installations, Give It or Leave It features a series of experimental portraits of different sites related to spirituality, creativity, and utopianism. Much of the research conducted for Smith’s film projects has taken place in California, on location at Alice Coltrane’s ashram, The Vedantic Center...

Do Ho Suh’s works elicit a physical manifestation of memory, exploring ideas of personal history, cultural tradition, and belief systems in the contemporary world. Best known for his full-size, fabric reconstructions of his former residences in Seoul, Providence, Berlin, London, and New York, Suh’s creations of physicalized memory address issues of home, displacement, individuality, and collectivity, articulated through the architecture of domestic space.

A recent gift to LACMA, 348 West...

Cauleen Smith works in the spirit of African American science fiction novelist Samuel R. Delany and other speculative writers, who use imaginations of the future to engage with conflicts and challenges of the present. The exhibition title is a variation on Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). From the end of 2020 into 2021, Smith conducted virtual visits with Charles White Elementary School classes, inviting students...

Ventriloquism relies on the confusion between sight and hearing, puppeteer and puppet, silence and speech. Issues of agency, authorship, and objecthood are at the core of even the most conventional ventriloquist sketch: Where is the voice coming from? How is that voice split into many bodies? Who is speaking on behalf of whom?

Using this popular form of entertainment as a guide, the exhibition stages dialogues across LACMA’s collections, focusing...

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...

The first substantial project on the art of Fiji to be mounted in the United States, Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific will feature over 280 artworks drawn from major international collections, including the Fiji Museum, British Museum, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge), the Smithsonian, and distinguished private collections. The exhibition will include figurative sculpture, ritual kava bowls, breastplates of pearl shell and whale ivory, large-scale barkcloths, small portable...

Los Angeles­–­­­­based artist Alex Prager is known for making photographs and short films embellished with Technicolor fantasy but grounded in the pains and pleasures of the everyday. In this installation, Prager satirizes a specific part of working life, drawing on pop culture tropes to create a simulation of office holiday parties. The artist animates figurative sculptures with costumes, makeup, props, and sound, and places them in recognizable office-party situations, creating...

Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn presents the first career survey of paintings and works on paper by multifaceted artist Luchita Hurtado (Venezuela, b. 1920). Prior to 2016, the remarkable breadth of Hurtado’s eight-decade career was virtually unknown, as her works were kept in storage and out of public view for most of her life. This exhibition will introduce museum audiences to several distinct bodies of...

Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Julie Mehretu is a mid-career survey that will unite nearly 40 works on paper with 35 paintings dating from 1996 to the present by Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). The first-ever comprehensive retrospective of Mehretu’s career, it covers over two decades of her examination of history, colonialism, capitalism, geopolitics, war, global uprising...

Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles) is one of the most talented artists of her generation. She is not as well known as her talents deserve, however, no doubt largely because she is a black woman who came of age in the 1960s outside of New York City. Her work consistently addresses issues of race, gender, and spirituality. Very much a part of the strong assemblage tradition of Southern California...

Antipodes, the parts of the earth diametrically opposite to each other, have been an important part of Kirsten Mosher’s work, which includes painting, sculpture, video, and text. Soul Mate 180° is an installation comprising two elements: a marble sculpture nested in the garden outside of BCAM, and a short story displayed on a beam outside BCAM, Level 2. The sculpture depicts a wave in the Indian Ocean—the opposite side of...

For several years, Mineo Mizuno has lived on Fort Mountain Ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The intense beauty of the idyllic forest has inspired the artist’s latest body of work, which includes interventions across the property using ceramics, fallen trees, and manzanita shrubs removed to avert fires. For Harmony, he transplants elements of this immersive environment to Los Angeles. Tea House, like an earlier...

For 50 years, Thomas Joshua Cooper has been making photographs outdoors. Often realized through intense physical travel to remote and isolated sites, these stunning, large-scale, black-and-white photographs encapsulate the psychological impact of the place through geographic and atmospheric details. The exhibition, comprising 65 large-scale and 75 8 x 10 black-and-white photographs, showcases Cooper’s The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, The World’s Edge, the Atlantic Basin Project, which...

Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood, to hair, tobacco, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and develop this creative mode, with some devoting decades of their practice to experiments with a...

Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art celebrates one of the most distinctive and compelling aspects of Japanese art: the depiction of animals. Underpinned by Japan's unique spiritual heritage of Shintō and Buddhism, the Japanese reverence for nature—and the place of animals within that realm—is expressed in sculpture, painting, lacquer-work, ceramics, metalwork, cloisonné, and woodblock prints.
 
Lions, dogs, horses, oxen, cats, fish, insects, birds, dragons, phoenixes—animals warm and cold-blooded...

Mary Corse’s first solo museum survey is a long overdue examination of this singular artist’s career. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Corse emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. This focused...