Art-Exhibitions-Past

Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures explores the world's oldest and most versatile method of making multiple images. More than 150 works from Asia, Europe, and the Americas present the medium as both a means of creative expression and a vehicle for mass production that enabled images and ideas to circulate widely. Textiles, prints, and books offer intricate patterns and striking imagery that reveal block printing’s global history, from the...

Returning to Los Angeles for the first time since 2015, Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a 24-hour single-channel montage constructed from thousands of moments of cinema and television history depicting the passage of time, excerpted and edited together to create a functioning timepiece synchronized to local time wherever it is shown. The result marks the exact time for the viewer for 24 consecutive hours, weaving together Marclay’s interests in collage...

Celebrating the arrival of the World Cup in Los Angeles, Fútbol Is Life presents works by award‑winning animator and visual‑effects artist Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr. Crafted from gum wrappers, glue, paint, and other materials, his miniature “sportraits” capture iconic moments in women’s and men’s soccer. Barrois brings a playful yet emotional energy to his meticulously hand‑made sculptures and stop-motion animations, which showcase the game’s grace and power. Fútbol Is Life highlights the artist’s inventive approach to storytelling and...

Village Square brings together nearly 50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection in a celebration of art and community. The exhibition showcases expressive landscapes and striking portraits by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Modigliani, Sisley, Soutine, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Many of these bold, dynamic works grew out of close friendships among artists, and on occasion with Henry Pearlman himself. Village Square honors the Pearlmans’ belief...

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia presents an international survey of Buddhism and Buddhist art, beginning with the religion’s origins in India and following its spread through mainland and island Southeast Asia (Myanmar [Burma], Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia), the Himalayas (Kashmir, Nepal, and Tibet), and East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan). Incorporating 180 masterpieces of pan-Asian Buddhist art, the exhibition introduces key concepts of Buddhist thought and...

Josiah McElheny’s dramatic Island Universe, installed in the center of the Resnick Pavilion, embodies the concept of the multiverse, or multiple coexisting universes. Now a key element of contemporary cosmological thinking, the concept of the multiverse was first proposed in ancient Greece, then in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and 18th-century astronomy. McElheny, who is interested in how scientific inquiry is conditioned by and impacts philosophical, sociological, and political thought, finds...

This multisensory installation, rooted at the intersection of cinema and visual art, marks the 25th anniversary of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s legendary debut feature Amores Perros (2000). Over a million feet of film were left behind on the cutting room during the film’s edit. A selection of these never-before-seen fragments has been excavated from the archives for the first time, and they are illuminated here by an assemblage of 35mm projectors...

Andrew Thomas Huang’s The Deer of Nine Colors is a cyber-futuristic retelling of a Buddhist folktale in which a nine-colored deer saves a drowning merchant, only to be betrayed by the merchant’s greed. In Huang’s three-channel video, a Thai trans woman retraces her past life as a Schomburgk’s deer—an extinct species from Thailand—on a quest for her true name. Drawing on his background in animation, puppetry, and visual effects, Huang...

Grounded invites visitors to see land not just as terrain, but as a foundation for exploring ecology, sovereignty, memory, and home. Featuring 35 artists based in the Americas and the Pacific, the exhibition showcases 40 works, spanning the 1970s to today, with many on view for the first time. Works include Lisa Reihana’s monumental video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected] that reimagines colonial narratives from her perspective as a...

This intimate presentation, part of a generous multiyear gift from the Kallir Family Collection, celebrates Otto Kallir’s legacy as a scholar and gallerist who brought Austrian modernism to American audiences. Featuring paintings, drawings, and prints, it includes LACMA’s first painting by Gustav Klimt, several newly acquired works by Egon Schiele, and the visually striking periodical Ver Sacrum—all hallmarks of Viennese Expressionism.

This presentation of works on paper with paintings and sculptures draws primarily from two major collections of modern art: the Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection, formed in Los Angeles and gifted to LACMA 20 years ago, and the collection of Maria and Conrad Janis, recently bequeathed to LACMA from one of the sons of esteemed New York gallerist Sidney Janis. Through the lens of these two collections, this selection reflects...

Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, the artist’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles, invites viewers into immersive multisensory installations. Each of the exhibition’s rooms presents a distinct environment, from uncanny everyday spaces to a field of rice grass populated with ceramic figures to a gallery of monumental bronze sculptures. Strachan is interested in what has been rendered invisible within mainstream narratives. His singular artworks—across media including neon, ceramics...

Designed to evoke the type of mid-century cinema where the films that inspired Youssef Nabil’s art were shown, this exhibition showcases the artist’s 2015 video I Saved My Belly Dancer, a recent LACMA acquisition. It also features 11 related photographs that parallel the filmic storyline, along with contemporaneous Egyptian film posters. Like much of Nabil’s work, the subject matter is subtly autobiographical and reflects his longing for the past...

Over the past four decades, Shanghai-born, Marin County–based artist Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961) has cultivated a unique practice that engages with the driving concepts and aesthetics of the Light and Space movement and East Asia’s tradition of ink painting. Educated in both traditional Chinese figurative painting and installation and performance art, Zheng synthesizes these seemingly disparate practices into unprecedented signature painting and video techniques. Zheng Chongbin: Golden State is a...

Beeple’s Diffuse Control is an image-generating sculpture that invites visitors to collaborate with artificial intelligence. A custom website allows participants to interact with the AI generative system, which transforms images of select public domain artworks from LACMA’s permanent collection. The sculpture—comprising 12 large video screens—displays the resulting images, allowing the audience to remix this new creation in real time and generate unique prints from the sculpture. As the exhibition progresses...

Since the 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Frances Stark has created a vast body of work that examines systems of communication and the nature of intimacy. She is the second participant in the Artist Selects series, which invites artists to create an exhibition with works from LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Guided by formal and thematic rhymes, Stark’s visual essay brings together works by Karl Blossfeldt, Otto Dix, Wassily...

An examination of the innovations in calligraphic art, Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection highlights experimental works of modern and contemporary calligraphic art made by artists including Yahon Chang, Fung Ming Chip, Gu Wenda, Inoue Yūichi, Lee In, Henri Michaux, Nguyễn Quang Thắng, Qiu Zhijie, Tong Yangtze, Wang Dongling, Wei Ligang, and Xu Bing. Works on view reveal the evolution of the pictograph, explorations of the...

Language, both written and spoken, has been a subject throughout Bruce Nauman’s six-decade career, which includes sculpture, printmaking, video, and installation. Words are not just carriers of meaning; their visual form and rhythm are integral to his artwork. Bruce Nauman: From the Collection brings together two works that engage language in distinct ways. Lewidr (1972), one of Nauman’s early neon word sculptures, is an anagram of the last name of...

Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. Color mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. By engineering and deploying...

A monumental interactive AR experience, Nancy Baker Cahill’s Substrate invites the viewer to consider connections between knowledge-making organizations by contributing their own descriptions of culturally significant artifacts. Borrowing imagery and examples from networks in nature, Baker Cahill depicts LACMA, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, and California’s system of community colleges as abstracted, interlocking trees with root systems and mycelial networks that produce essential nutrients for human health and...

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics finds aesthetic connections among 60 artists working in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The exhibition and its catalogue are among the first to examine nearly a quarter century of production by Black artists. The project debuts new acquisitions for LACMA and expands the Pan-African exhibition canon, historically focused on the Black Atlantic, by showcasing artists working along the Pacific Rim. Nearly 70 works...

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing...

Ritual Expressions: African Adornment from the Permanent Collection is a focused presentation of a rich diversity of textiles, clothing, and headwear representing more than 20 cultures. In many cultures throughout the African continent, bodily adornment is a testament to the meticulous craftsmanship of its creators. The visually stunning pieces, with vivid colors, mesmerizing patterns, and symbolic motifs, often signify prestige and power and are critical in establishing and transmitting the...

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures, created in collaboration with scientists at the Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory, presents a group of rare and visually stunning artworks from different cultures and time periods to explore the variety of human attempts to explain the universe’s origins, mechanics, and meaning. Nearly every ancient culture has seen the heavens as a mirror of cosmic structure and process, and ancient measurements of...