Art-Exhibitions-Past

Zak Ové (born 1966) is a British visual artist of Trinidadian descent. His sculptural installation, The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness, encapsulates the complex history of racial objectification and the evolution of black subjectivity. The title’s references—Ben Jonson’s 1605 play, The Masque of Blackness, and Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man—mark two milestones in black history: the first stage production to utilize blackface makeup, and...

Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing will be the first exhibition held outside of Asia to focus on the history of writing and calligraphy in Korea. Believed to mirror one’s qualities as a human being in ways unmatched by any other art, calligraphy has long been considered one of the highest art forms in Korea. This exhibition, organized both conceptually and chronologically, explores the role of calligraphy in different...

Frank Stella (b. 1936) has been a pivotal figure in the development of modern art since the 1950s. Working in multiple mediums, he has created an extensive body of work that has consistently challenged the conventions of art making and expanded its definitions. Over the past 60 years Stella has pushed the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism, helped usher in Minimalism, and blurred distinctions between painting and sculpture, continuously experimenting with...

Presented at the original Otis Art Institute campus where Charles White was the first African American faculty member (now an eponymous elementary school and LACMA satellite), this companion exhibition to Charles White: A Retrospective illuminates the artist’s impact as a teacher. Beyond fostering technical skills, White urged his students to be “thinking artists” and hone distinct points of view. Indicative of this encouragement, the show features artwork in diverse media...

Typography is at the heart of visual communication. The selection, organization, and placement of letterforms in a work of graphic design profoundly impact how a viewer interprets the text. Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, designers have used typography to reframe the words on a page, striving to capture the pace and mood of their time through decisions about letter spacing and form. Drawn entirely from acquisitions made...

Isaac Julien CBE RA (United Kingdom, b. 1960) is an artist and filmmaker whose multi-channel film installations and photographs feature fractured narratives reflecting his explorations into race, class, sexuality, postcolonialism, and representation. Co-founder of Sankofa Film and Video Collective in 1983 and Normal Films in 1991, Julien has won numerous awards and honors and has had over 60 solo exhibitions worldwide. Marking the artist’s first major presentation in Los Angeles, Playtime...

Central Asia’s textiles are rich with patterns influenced by the various cultures that traveled through or settled along the historic Silk Road. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region experienced a renaissance in ikat, a technique where silk threads were bound and resist-dyed before weaving into cloth. The result were vivid textile patterns comprising blurred, cloud-like juxtapositions of color, called abrbandi (literally “cloud binding”). To create these distinctive...

LACMA has the largest Korean art galleries of any museum in the United States. On view now are spectacular examples of Korean paintings, ceramics, textiles, and Buddhist art. The ceramics span nearly 2,000 years of Korean history, from the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE–CE 668) to the present, while the paintings focus on works from the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910). Among the ceramics are excellent examples of Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) celadon...

Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) is one of the most important artists of her generation and a pioneer of performance and conceptual art in Southern California. In 1972, she challenged definitions of sculpture, self-portraiture, photographic documentation, and performance with CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture. Consisting of 148 black-and-white photographs, CARVING shows the transformation of Antin’s body as she lost 10 pounds over 37 days.
 
In 2017, Antin restaged her landmark...

One of the most pioneering artists of the last century, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) produced a diverse body of work characterized by experimentation, the use of varied mediums and methods, and cross-cultural exchange. Rauschenberg’s monumental The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981–98) exemplifies these tenets of his artistic practice. Created over 17 years, the work is composed of 190 panels that, combined, measure approximately a quarter mile in length. An...

The first major 21st-century museum retrospective on this famed mid-century artist, Charles White: A Retrospective traces White’s career and impact in the cities he called home: Chicago, his birthplace; New York, where he joined social causes and gained acclaim; and Los Angeles, where he developed his mature art and became a civil rights activist. The exhibition includes approximately 100 drawings and prints along with lesser-known oil paintings. A superb draftsman...

April 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus (1919–1933), an architecture and applied art school that moved between the German cities of Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin before it was forced to close by the Nazi government. The Bauhaus cannot be summed up by any one place, style, or workshop, but its influence on arts education can still be felt today. Although often associated with its most familiar names, figures...

The late 20th century was a transformational period for graphic design. Questioning the increasingly rigid rules of modernism, designers pressed for greater autonomy in their work. At the same time, dizzying advances in technology upended existing design and production processes. Far from the established New York design world, California became a haven for avant-garde designers, a hub of innovation in both discourse and practice.

This exhibition is part of LACMA’s...

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler’s Flora is based on their discoveries about the unknown American artist Flora Mayo, with whom the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti had a love affair in Paris in the 1920s. While Giacometti is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, Mayo’s oeuvre has been destroyed and her biography was previously relegated as a footnote in Giacometti scholarship.

Hubbard / Birchler reframe this history...

During his prolific 60-year career, choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) revolutionized dance by challenging every aspect of the form. Perhaps most radical was his idea that all the elements of a dance—movement, music, costumes, and decor—could be created independently of one another, coming together only during the “common time” of a performance. Along with his life partner, composer John Cage (1912–1992), Cunningham explored this freeing notion by initiating cross-disciplinary collaborations with...

LACMA hosts the West Coast presentation of Outliers and American Vanguard Art, the first major exhibition to explore key moments in American art history when avant-garde artists and outliers intersected, and how their interchanges ushered in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. The first part of the exhibition illustrates how the early history of American modernism, especially the first years of the Museum of Modern Art, championed...

Over the course of its 2,000-year history, Rome has been alternatively held as the epitome of republic, the decadence of empire, the force of Catholicism, the artistic and literary birthplace of naturalism, and above all, the source of classicism. Despite these various, and ostensibly conflicting associations, its classical epithet—the Eternal City—reflects the symbiosis of these qualities and their lasting influence on republics, nations, religions and even continents beyond. For while...

ROMA, a new film from Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón that chronicles a tumultuous year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s, will be in theaters as of December 14. On view in the Ahmanson Building lobby at LACMA is a selection of photographs taken during the filming of ROMA by Carlos Somonte (Mexico, born 1956). They are by no means literal “out-takes,” but...

One of the most pioneering artists of the last century, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) produced a diverse body of work characterized by experimentation, the use of varied mediums and methods, and an embrace of cross-cultural exchange. Although Rauschenberg was born in Texas and lived primarily in New York and Florida, Los Angeles played a pivotal role in his artistic development. His first visit to an art museum occurred in Southern California...

Fantasies and Fairy Tales explores the role of fantasy and the recurrence of popular fairy tales, myths, and legends in the graphic arts in the years around 1900, incorporating select earlier examples as well as more recent works. Artists pushed the limits of their imaginations for different purposes. Fantasy was used to examine individual emotional and mental states, to visualize spiritual transcendence, and as a springboard for aesthetic experimentation and...

Hidden Narratives brings together a selection of recent acquisitions from LACMA’s growing collection of modern and contemporary art. Though the works on view were made decades apart by artists of different backgrounds, they nevertheless share certain conceptual and formal concerns. The featured artists communicate narratives in artistic mediums ranging from painting to sculpture, from film to mixed media, and through both abstract and figurative means. The stories they relay remain...

In conjunction with On-Site: Neighborhood Partnerships with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA presents two exhibitions at the Vincent Price Art Museum featuring the museum’s rich collection of Egyptian art and a recent donation of works by Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky. On-Site is a community engagement initiative that creates ways to make LACMA’s programs and collection accessible to the communities of Los Angeles County with the goal of...

This exhibition will feature over 50 examples of the finely painted ceramic wares produced by the Mimbres people in the region of southwestern New Mexico between 850 and 1150 CE. The hallmark of Mimbres culture are extraordinary black-and-white ceramic bowls, painted with great ingenuity, dexterity, and precision. The bowls are best known for the variety of animals and plant life that they depict, with a small number of vessels showing...