Art-Exhibitions-Past

Travel back in time and discover remarkable objects that illuminate the life, culture, and pageantry of the samurai, the revered and feared warriors of Japan. The Samurai Collection of Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, one of the finest and most comprehensive collections in the world, presents a treasure trove of battle gear made for high-ranking warriors and daimyo (provincial governors) of the 14th through 19th centuries. The exhibition illustrates the...

Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist presents a full-scale survey of one the most important artists of the Harlem Renaissance, featuring the painter's visual examination of African American culture during the Jazz Age. The exhibition covers Motley's entire career, including periods in Chicago, Paris, and Mexico. Motley received his formal training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and went on to create strong and somewhat solemn portraits of...

This exhibition features the work of influential American modernist painter Marsden Hartley (1877–1943). Approximately twenty-five of the artist’s seminal works from his years spent in Berlin (1913–1915) reveal the profound impact of World War I and elucidate the artist's appropriation of military symbols and Native American motifs. Hartley’s paintings from this period reflect dynamic shifts in style and subject matter, and evidence a critical moment in his body of work...

African Cosmos: Stellar Arts is the first major exhibition to explore the historical legacy of African cultural astronomy and its intersection with traditional and contemporary African arts. For millennia, Africans have gazed upon the celestial firmament, made sense of the heavenly bodies above them, and used their observations to chart movements through the physical environment and regulate agricultural and ritual calendars. The exhibition considers how the sun, moon and stars...

Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C. (2005), a large-scale installation by Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, is presented at LACMA for the first time since entering the museum’s collection in 2013. The work takes as its starting point monuments found throughout the United States commemorating those killed during the “Indian wars” between Native Americans and white settlers. These conflicts occurred intermittently for more than 200 years...



Initially created in 

1941 for the Post Office in Venice, California, under the auspices of the Treasury Department’s Section of 

Fine Arts, Edward Biberman's mural Abbot Kinney and the Story of Venice has been recently restored. The monumental painting depicts city founder Abbot Kinney’s grand vision for Venice as a 

West-coast cultural mecca. The exhibition includes  other works of art from the museum’s collection, as well as historical photographs and...

Visually and intellectually compelling, textile fragments hold clues and tell stories about the past. An excerpt from the extensive collection of fragments assembled by Lloyd Cotsen, this exhibition presents mysterious and tantalizingly incomplete segments of textiles from throughout history and from around the world, from Peru to Uzbekistan to China and representing a span of more than 2,000 years.

Fragmentary Tales traces a collector’s interest in pattern, color, and texture...

Treasures from Korea presents more than 150 works from the time of the world's longest-ruling Confucian dynasty, lasting more than 500 years. On display are many Korean national treasures that have never before been shown in the United States. This comprehensive survey is organized around five key themes that together illuminate a period that continues to influence modern manners, norms and social attitudes: the role of the king and his...

Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky sheds new light on the extraordinary response of artists in Germany and France to key developments in modern art in the early 20th century. For the first time in a major museum exhibition, Expressionism is presented as an international movement in which artists responded with various aesthetic approaches to the work of modern masters such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul...

John Altoon is the first major retrospective devoted to this little-known yet important artist whose brief but significant career unfolded in southern California from the 1950s until his untimely death in 1969 at age 43. The exhibition includes approximately 70 paintings and drawings from public and private collections across the United States.

Trained as a commercial illustrator as well as a fine artist, Altoon developed both an abstract vocabulary influenced...

Sam Doyle was born in 1906 on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, the center of the region's Gullah community, where African influences thrived. He began making paintings on cast-off sheet metal and wood panels in 1944; most were portraits of people and events important to his community. He displayed the paintings to the public in the yard of his clapboard house. By the time Doyle retired in the late 1960s...

Since the invention of photography, artists have looked to the night as a rich subject for photographic exploration.  Between sunset and sunrise, when the responsibilities of the day give way to the autonomy of the night, the world takes on a mysterious glow that is rich with metaphor and innuendo.

The exhibition title, Night in Day, references a poem by Joseph Stroud that reflects on those slivers of the...

One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Alexander Calder revolutionized modern sculpture. Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, with significant cooperation from the Calder Foundation, explores the artist’s radical translation of French Surrealist vocabulary into American vernacular. His most iconic works, coined mobiles by Marcel Duchamp, are kinetic sculptures in which flat pieces of painted metal connected by wire move delicately in the air, propelled by...

The exhibition examines football—nicknamed "the beautiful game" by one sports commentator—and its significance in societies around the world. As a subject, football touches on issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures. Celebrating the sport on the eve of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the exhibition includes approximately thirty artists from around the world who...

This is the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the story of Chinese paintings in Japan over the course of six hundred years, featuring nearly forty masterpieces of the Tang (618–906), Song (960–1279), Yuan (1260–1368), and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. Most of these paintings, owned by Japanese museums, have never been displayed outside of Japan.

The exhibition demonstrates Japan’s role in preserving a large part of China’s cultural and artistic...

Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible features the first large-scale sculptural installation by this pioneer of the Light and Space movement.

After taking up sculpture in the late 1960s, Pashgian became one of a group of artists in the Los Angeles area to experiment with new materials such as fiberglass, resin, plastic, and coated glass. For the current exhibition, Pashgian has created 12 molded-acrylic columns that fill an entire gallery. The sculpture...

Four Abstract Classicists features hard-edge abstractions from LACMA’s collection by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. The term “abstract classicists” was coined in 1959 by curator and critic Jules Langsner to define these four southern California painters whose work he grouped in a seminal exhibition that year at the Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park (prior to LACMA’s existence as an independent art museum). The work...

As part of the museum’s ongoing engagement with the community, LACMA presents an exhibition of work by Kaz Oshiro at the museum's satellite gallery within Charles White Elementary School. The exhibition juxtaposes objects Oshiro selected from the museum's collection, new work based on his interactions at the school, and student art. Oshiro is best known for creating high fidelity sculptures of everyday objects—microwaves, dumpsters, file cabinets. By using the...

The Color of Life: Japanese Paintings from the Price Collectionfeatures works by artists Itō Jakuchū, Nagasawa Rosetsu, Maruyama Ōkyo, Suzuki Kiitsu, Sakai Hōitsu, and Kawanabe Kyōsai, among others. The masterpieces on view in the exhibition are part of the renowned collection of Etsuko and Joe Price.

In 2013 this exhibition traveled to three cities in the Tōhoku region of Japan, which was directly impacted by the great earthquake and...

James Turrell: A Retrospective explores nearly fifty years in the career of James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles), a key artist in the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and 70s. The exhibition includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional work with holograms. One section is devoted to the Turrell masterwork in...

Los Angeles residents Marjorie and Leonard Vernon began to collect photography in 1975, eventually building a collection of some 3,600 photographs spanning the entire history of the medium. In 2008 LACMA acquired the complete collection, making it possible for the museum to represent photography’s full range and its centrality in modern visual culture. This exhibition of 220 photographs from the Vernon Collection takes a historical perspective, identifying parallels between photography...

From the early 1930s through the early 1980s, the Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (1907–1997) helped forge an evocative and enduring image of Mexico. Among the most important cinematographers of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Figueroa worked with leading directors from Mexico, the United States and Europe, traversing a wide range of genres while maintaining his distinctive and vivid visual style. In the 1930s, Figueroa was part of a...

Since the early 1990s, Bangkok-based artist Pinaree Sanpitak has produced a diverse body of work exploring the human form and the various qualities associated with the female body. Her installation Hanging by a Thread consists of eighteen hammocks woven from printed cotton textiles, known as paa-lai, used throughout Thailand for clothing and other purposes. When Thailand suffered severe floods during the 2011 monsoon season, royal-sponsored relief efforts included the...

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, commissioned to rethink the east campus at LACMA, continues to provide new insight into the meaning and function of an encyclopedic museum and the relationship of architecture to its site. The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA, an exhibition that was on view at the museum through September 15, 2013, presented the future of the museum's campus through a detailed examination of the museum's...