Los Angeles art exhibitions: the best shows to see in June 2025

As the summer art season in LA kicks off, LACMA is inviting members of all levels to preview the new Geffen Galleries on 26-28 June before the collection is installed. After a series of special ‘sonic experiences’ by saxophonist Kamasi Washington with an ensemble of more than 100 musicians dispersed across the 110,000 square feet of gallery space – designed by renowned architect Peter Zumthor— all playing the composer and bandleaders celebrated work ‘Harmonies of Difference’ simultaneously for a once-in-lifetime performance and public viewing. Also, in the spirit of communal experiences and public viewing, as Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Downtown LA is unveiling a series of murals in real time.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in June 2025

Big Art. Bigger Dreams.

Downtown LA, until 2028

DTLA Alliance, has partnered with Street Art for Mankind (SAM) and the City of Los Angeles to create a public art museum launching in real time starting with three massive murals by acclaimed LA-based artists. With support from the Coca-Cola Company, a total of 12 large-scale works will be created that will reimagine downtown’s skyline and streetscape by 2028 when the city is set to host the Olympic Games.

Each mural celebrates global values of sustainability, education, and women’s empowerment, turning walls into landmarks. David Flores is creating a massive, vibrant mural on the Los Angeles Athletic Club (LAAC) depicting a skateboarding scene, Emily Ding is bringing to life a powerful and elegant mural of two women walking arm-in-arm on the Figueroa Eight while Shamsia Hassani is crafting a poetic triptych on The Bloc.

ERROR CODE

ALTA until 8 June 2025

Contemporary painting and ceramics by Tokyo-based painter Shun Okada, and Philadelphia–based sculptor Nick Lenker pull apart themes coded within the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/ Family Computer (Famicon)—a 1980s platform that was more than just a Japanese video game console. First released in Japan in 1983 as the Famicon and later to the U.S. market as the NES, the NES reshaped American pop culture and laid the groundwork for how we understand games, childhood, entertainment, and technology today. The result is a cross-Pacific conversation between the two artists, connected by a shared cultural moment that explores virtual worlds from Super Mario to Zelda and Kirby. The ‘glitch’ state captured within those games echoes through the many broken systems of our shared reality - living within an unresolved error code—looping, crashing, trying to reboot, and caught within a simulation of our own making.

Noah Davis

Hammer until 31 August 2025

For the first U.S. institutional survey of the visionary artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), following its debut at DAS MINSK in Potsdam and the Barbican in London, this exhibition is a homecoming to Los Angeles, a city where Davis lived, worked, and left an enduring legacy. Organized chronologically, tracing Davis’s career from 2007 until his passing in 2015, the exhibit brings together over 50 works spanning painting, sculpture, and paper, offering a comprehensive overview of his practice, including his curatorial and community-building efforts as co-founder of the Underground Museum, Los Angeles. This body of work delves into an exploration of politics, current affairs, everyday life, ancient Egypt, family history, racism in American media, art history, and architecture, and includes a selection of Davis’s eclectic source material on display for the first time.

Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me

The Broad until 28 September 2025

Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2024 with a solo presentation. That exhibition has traveled to The Broad and can be seen for the first time outside of its debut abroad and includes over thirty artworks affirming the artist’s radically inclusive vision. The exhibition will highlight Gibson’s distinct use of geometric design and saturated color alongside references to 19th and 20th century foundational American documents and modern music, critiquing systemic injustices and imagining a more equitable future. His inspirations range from legacies of craft, queer histories, found objects, and house music amongst others.

Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 19

Southern Guild until 6 September 2025

Southern Guild is showing two simultaneous exhibitions that document and platform Queer identity across various experiences globally, and the gallery will be activated as a safe, welcoming space for the LGBTQIA+ community and a nexus of exchange with a program of exhibition-related events.

Faces and Phases 19 celebrates 19 years of Muholi’s seminal portrait project documenting the lives of Black lesbian, bisexual and Queer women, Trans and gender non-conforming people. Initially focused on South Africa, the new series of portraits expands the project’s geography into the US, UK, Brazil and Portugal. This now-historic body of work comprises a collection of close to 1,000 photographs, collectively forming a “living Queer archive”.

Prelude to the Sun

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery until 2 July 2025

This solo presentation of the Brazilian artist, Sandra Cinto, includes a massive, sweeping, gold-toned wall drawing that envelops viewers in a cosmic skyscape—woven with recurring motifs of stars, waves, swings, and bridges—that speak to memory, time, and the natural world. This immersive piece showcases how Cinto has used drawing to transform built environments into public spaces of dreamlike reflection, and her ongoing engagement with architecture. Through her meticulous mark-making, Cinto engages with themes of time, transcendence, and the human condition—exploring hardship, resilience, and the delicate interplay of chaos and harmony.

Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies

Fahey/Klein until 5 July 2025

This new photographic exhibition revisits the terrain of youth culture and identity formation in the digital age. Expanding on her acclaimed five-part docuseries of the same name, Social Studies (FX/Hulu) marks Greenfield’s return to a subject she has explored since her groundbreaking 1997 debut, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.

Shot during the 2021–2022 school year across Los Angeles while following a diverse group of teens navigating high school, home life, and relationships under the influence of ever-present social media. Greenfield creates a powerful meditation on adolescence, what she calls ‘comparison culture’, and the search for authenticity in a curated world. As she continues to investigate the themes of status, beauty, identity, and power, this reflects her ongoing commitment to making the invisible visible—revealing how young people see themselves and how we construct and consume those images – including a ‘lip challenge’ by Kylie Jenner.

Kader Attia: The Hubris of Modernity

Regen Projects until 21 June 2025

French artist Kader Attia’s second solo exhibition with the gallery features new sculptures and large-scale installations that explore the enduring legacies of colonialism and the tensions between nature, culture, and modernity. The focal point is an installation of mechanically choreographed rainstick instruments activated by rotary motors, the percussive instruments evoke the sound of rain through poetic, circular movements. Moving collectively and individually, the clock-like motion of the rainsticks alludes to the cycles of falling rain and the passing of time. The work addresses humanity’s illusory superiority over nature and meditates on the rhythms of our collective existence.

Psychotropic Portals

Gallery 33 until 16 June 2025

In his first solo exhibition at the Santa Monica gallery, artist and cinematographer Julian Whatley tackles an exploration of the American West, past and present, recontextualized in a cinematic fever dream embedded with a sense of distortion: history as a hallucination.

The oil paintings that harken to the memory bank of classic American Western films are shown alongside a massive video wall that recontextualizes archival film clips—spotlighting only the female characters from classic Westerns, while graphic overlays erase the men. Performers roam the gallery: an 1860s cowboy, a saloon singer, a ghostly 1950s Kid Cowboy, and a Cosmic Cowboy channeling transmissions from an alternate timeline. The effect is part immersive theater, part speculative history, and part quantum ritual.

Justina Blakeney: California Poppy

Art Wolf Gallery at Una Casa Privada until 30 June 2025

Celebrated for bringing the LA boho movement mainstream, visionary artist and designer Justina Blakeney debuted her inaugural solo exhibition, California Poppy, curated by Art Wolf Gallery, open by appointment at Una Casa Privada - Una Malan’s private showcase home nestled in the Hollywood Hills.

Shaped by deep personal transformation, including the 2025 Eaton fire, which has forever changed her neighborhood of Altadena, Blakeney's recent body of work is centered in an otherworldly realm, California poppies—symbols of hope, growth, and renewal that she has admired since childhood—become totems of personal and collective healing while blooming through the ashes, pushing through the scorched earth, toward the light. For more information and to schedule a viewing, please contact Art Wolf Gallery at yael@artwolfgallery.com

Josh Sperling: Big Picture

Perrotin until 3 July 2025

For American artist Josh Sperling’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, his vibrant shaped canvases and interlocking forms draw on influences from minimalist abstraction to Memphis design. This exhibition marks a significant evolution in his practice, featuring new paintings alongside his first foray into functional design in the United States, introducing modular benches and framed mirrors— extending his visual language beyond the canvas and into new contexts.

Tomoo Gokita: NAKED

BLUM Los Angeles until 2 August 2025

For Gokita’s third solo exhibit with the gallery, the artist turns his attention to the trope of the female nude, reframing a historically overdetermined subject with acidic irreverence and grotesque beauty. In these paintings, Surrealist bodies bristle with defiant physicality, eschewing objectification in favor of confrontational agency. Referencing the glamor of Playboy, the weirdness of B-movie aesthetics, and the compositional motifs of Impressionist painting, these nudes are saturated with intense, unsettling color.

Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream, and Dirty Dancing

Skirball Cultural Center, until 31 August 2025

This personal and poignant exploration of inclusion and loss, sifts through the artist Marisa J. Futernick’s inherited and imagined memories of midcentury family vacations at Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains, known as the ‘Borscht Belt.’ Through multimedia works that incorporate photography, text, and video, many created specifically for this exhibition (her first solo presentation at a U.S. Museum), and on view for the first time, the artist juxtaposes her mother’s and grandmother’s strong feelings of the Jewish community with her own search for a deeper sense of belonging - sparking conversation about memory, assimilation, and loss.

The gallery also includes an annotated map of the Catskills based on Futernick’s extensive archival and field research for the exhibition, featuring Jewish resorts and hotels but also those that welcomed other marginalized groups.

MyungJin Kim, Stan Bitters, and Bower Studios.

The Future Perfect until 20 June 2025

Originally slated for Frieze LA in February, this exhibition was put on hold due to the devastation of the LA fires by spotlighting artists who were directly impacted by the tragedies.

Now, you can experience this collection of works installed in the Goldwyn House, The Future Perfect’s LA gallery location, and the primary residence of founder David Alhadeff. The works on view activate the iconic location’s outdoor spaces with a site-specific installation in the pool house by MyungJin Kim, a new series of sculptures by Bower Studios in the sculpture garden, and four ceramic works by Stan Bitters.

Karin Gulbran

Parker Gallery until 14 June 2024

The first solo exhibition of the Los Angeles-based artist Karin Gulbran at Parker Gallery, is also marking the first exhibition of her work in Los Angeles in ten years. Gulbran’s ceramic sculptures comprise a variety of repeated forms, including: animal pots, fishbowls, pelican vases, singing birds, budding branch vessels and obscure mirrors. In turn, these forms feature often repeated decorative motifs, such as rain, stars, branches, flowers and coffee bean leaves. This presentation of new work highlights a full range of forms and motifs in the artist’s sculptural practice, alongside her first publicly exhibited painting in twenty-five years.

During renovations of Parker’s new Melrose Avenue gallery, the artist was taken with the Brazilian pink pepper tree rising up into two trunks that are protruding through the gallery deck, so the tree became a catalyst for conceptualizing this exhibition.

Rearview Mirror: Photographs, December 1963–February 1964

Gagosian Beverly Hills until 21 June 2025

Beatles fans can immerse themselves in a new exhibition of thirty-six works of recently rediscovered photographs shot with a 35 mm Pentax camera by Sir Paul McCartney. These include never-before-seen images, taken between December 1963 and February 1964, and offers an indelible picture of Beatlemania as it was becoming a global phenomenon. The mix of black-and-white and color prints includes self-portraits, candid shots of McCartney’s bandmates, and an insider look of the pandemonium that ensued, some taken from a moving car as the band was shuttled between gigs from Liverpool to London and Paris to The Plaza in New York City.

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

David Zwirner until 21 June 2025

In conjunction with Fraenkel Gallery, David Zwirner will exhibit Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited. Organised by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recreating the iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work, this will be the first major survey of her work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago.

Fire Relief for Artists: A Benefit Exhibition

Louis Stern, West Hollywood, until Aug 16

Louis Stern Fine Arts has been a fixture in the Los Angeles art scene for over thirty years, and has been invested in the success and resilience of the community. In this spirit, the gallery has launched a benefit exhibition with all proceeds donated in their entirety to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund and the ADAA Relief Fund. Featuring works by Edith Bauman, Chris Collins, Gabriele Evertz, Laurie Fendrich. Kymber Holt, Heather Hutchison, Mokha Laget, Mark Leonard. Richard Neutra, Doug Ohlson, Jean-François Spricigo, John Vokoun, and Richard Wilson.

Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection

LACMA from 6 April until 19 October 2025

Line, Form, Qi is curated by Susanna Ferrell, Wynn Resorts Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Wan Kong, The Mozhai Foundation Assistant Curator of Chinese Art, at LACMA. The exhibition examines experimental works by 34 modern and contemporary calligraphic artists including Fung Ming Chip, Gu Gan, Inoue Yūichi, Lee In, Henri Michaux, Nguyễn Quang Thắng, Qiu Zhijie, Tong Yang-Tze, Wang Dongling, Wei Ligang, and Xu Bing, among others. This is the second in a series of exhibitions of works from LACMA’s Fondation INK Collection, a 400-piece collection of contemporary art in the spirit of ink.

Zheng Chongbin: Golden State

LACMA until 4 January 2026

Also, running at LACMA, and curated by Ferrell, Zheng Chongbin: Golden State, spotlights artist Zheng Chongbin’s explorations of water, light, movement, and California’s natural landscape. This exhibition marks the artist’s largest solo presentation in the U.S. to date and the first major showcase of his work with colored pigments. Where previous presentations have contextualized his practice in the canon of Chinese ink painting alone, this exhibition situates Zheng as a distinctly Californian artist.

Robert Irwin in Los Angeles

Pace, mid-city until 7 June 2025

Robert Irwin was a foundational figure in the California Light and Space movement, contributing to the arts in Southern California across painting, sculpture, and installation for nearly seven decades. This show sheds light on the most prolific and innovative period of his career.

This collection includes historically significant paintings and sculptures created by Irwin in the 1960s and 1970s—the years that would come to define the Light and Space movement. This includes a rare nine-foot-tall acrylic column that appears like a ripple in space—this sculpture is among the last physical objects that Irwin made before turning toward an entirely ephemeral and installation-based practice in the 1970s. Irwin first exhibited with Pace in 1966 and then mounted over 20 solo shows with the gallery during his lifetime.

Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy

Hollyhock House, Barnsdall Art Park, until 27 September 2025

Commissioned for the famed Frank Lloyd Wright home perched on a hill in Silver Lake, Hollyhock House’s centennial show features twenty-one photographs by LA-based Janna Ireland that introduce new perspectives on Los Angeles’ only World Heritage site. The photographs highlight the quiet, subtle details of the home and make visible the care and conservation that sustain the site over time.

The title of the exhibition comes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, in which he describes the process of realizing Hollyhock House. For Ireland, Wright’s phrase ‘even by proxy’ points to the fraught relationship between client and architect in building the house as well as the ongoing project of preservation.

As Ireland states, ‘I regard the story of Hollyhock House, and how it came to be in spite of the often contentious relationship between heiress Aline Barnsdall and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, as one of the great LA stories. It is a tale of ego and conflicting ambitions, as so many of the best stories are. My photographs are about light and shadow, wood and concrete, and the labor involved in preserving Wright and Barnsdall’s complicated project for future generations.’

This exhibit is presented in partnership with Project Restore and the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University. Janna Ireland (an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College) is the 2024 recipient of the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award, which is presented to a photographer who honors Shulman’s legacy by challenging the way we look at physical space.

L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years

L.A. Louver, Venice, until 14 June 2025

The 50th anniversary exhibition encompasses the gallery’s history, from its formation in 1975 to now. As one of the longest-established contemporary art galleries on the West Coast, they have launched more than 660 exhibitions. This presentation appears in all spaces of the gallery, which remains on the same block as the original 1970s location, when Venice Beach was a Bohemian art haven. The building designed by Frederick Fisher & Partners has held hundreds of exhibitions and events; and the artworks that have traveled the world.

This exhibit honors this initial ambition and the pivotal role the gallery has played in establishing L.A. as a global art center. Comprised of work by over 50 artists, the exhibition includes those from the early days of the gallery such as Max Cole, George Herms, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Don Suggs, international figures David Hockney, Sui Jianguo, Per Kirkeby, Leon Kossoff, stalwarts of the city’s creative landscape Tony Berlant, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Ken Price, and those living and working in Los Angeles today Rebecca Campbell, Gajin Fujita, Heather Gwen Martin, and Alison Saar.

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, mid-city, until 13 July 2025

Through more than 110 films spanning 130 years (1894–2024), this body of work highlights the role color has played since the earliest days of film history, both as a tool for technological experimentation and artistic expression. The exhibition investigates the role of color in film, from the technological advancements that made its use possible, to the ways filmmakers use color as a storytelling tool, to its psychological impact on audiences.

Nearly 150 objects from the silent era to the digital age will be on view, including rarely exhibited technology, costumes, props, and film posters. Do not miss the legendary ruby slippers designed by Gilbert Adrian from The Wizard of Oz (1939); a Wonka chocolate bar from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971); a recreation of the stargate corridor from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), among many other gems.

academymuseum.org

Mark Dion: Excavations

LaBrea Tar Pits, until September 2025

Presented as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this rare exhibition in the museum section of this LA landmark, focuses on Dion’s time working with scientists as an artist-in-residence at the Tar Pits.

Visually, Excavations appears to be a behind-the-scenes space, displaying new work alongside early museum murals, dioramas, and maquettes of Ice Age mammals from the Tar Pits, which is the world's only active urban excavation site for Ice Age fossils.

If you want to take a deeper dive, the companion Field Guide publication take a whimsical look at the aesthetics of museums and scientific methods, as well as the history and relevance of the La Brea Tar Pits.

tarpits.org/mark-dion-pst

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion

Skirball Cultural Center, Brentwood/Bel-Air, until 31 August 2025

This U.S. debut explores the remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg's career, from the 1970s to the present day including a selection of items drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. Garments from Greco-Roman drapery to kimonos, dance uniforms, and fellow designers that explore the connections between these historical pieces and her designs.

New artifacts also shed light on von Furstenberg’s life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a war refugee, offering additional perspective on the factors that shaped her life and work, including a spotlight on the designer’s mother Lily Nahmias featuring audio, images and text that explore her experience as a member of the resistance. Skirball Cultural Center President and CEO Jessie Kornberg commented, ‘Jewish connection to garment industries and needlepoint trades spans continents and generations. Past exhibitions like the retrospective on Rudi Gernreich or the textile art of Aram Han Sifuentes celebrated these connections.’

Intuit Dome

Inglewood, permanent

One of the most exciting art collections to hit Los Angeles can be found at the new home for the LA Clippers in Inglewood. The cutting-edge sports venue recently unveiled the monumental, site-specific, outdoor artworks commissioned for the Intuit Dome which opens to the public this August. The $11 million public art collection features a collection of globally recognised artists, selected by Ruth Berson, former deputy director of curatorial affairs at SFMOMA, who have deep ties to Los Angeles and intertwine their artistic talents with sports.

Glenn Kaino’s massive sculpture Sails, made of painted steel and wood looms in the form of the clipper ships that connected the world via the ocean’s trade routes. In this ship, basketball is the cultural wind that can connect us all.

Michael Massenburg’s mural of printed porcelain enamel on steel panel features figures of basketball, tennis, and soccer players, singers, musicians, and dancers, titled Cultural Playground expresses the artist’s belief that 'the two most profound things that unite people are the arts and sports.'

Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital artwork Swoosh, uses the entire surface of the Intuit Dome, designed by the architectural firm AECOM, with five animations will transform the surface of the dome and light up the sky with geometric panels.

Patrick Martinez’s sculpture Same Boat uses a neon sign to create an image that reproduces a statement by the late Civil Rights leader Whitney M. Young: “We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”

On a wall adjacent to Same Boat, you will find Kyungmi Shin’s stained-glass mosaic with stainless steel tracery, Spring to Life. For this work, Shin drew inspiration from Centinela Springs, the now-vanished water source in South Los Angeles that once supported the Tongva people and the land they cultivated. (If you would like to see more of Shin’s work, the artist has a solo exhibition at Craft Contemporary until 8, September 2024.)

The Dome opening features an exhibition of photographs by Catherine Opie (on loan from MOCA) evoking the experience of community. “We designed Intuit Dome to be a place that brings people together,” said Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports & Entertainment. “When it came to our public art, we wanted to deliver a collection that is as compelling to people well versed in art as it is to a novice viewer. We are eager to make these unique works, from these amazing artists, available to everyone.”

Mineo Mizuno: Homage to Nature

The Huntington, Pasadena, until 25 May 2029

The Huntington holds a library with British medieval manuscripts, including the 15th-century Ellesmere tome of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; 16 themed gardens with more than 83,000 living plants; an art museum and more.

In the main garden area on the vast grounds, Mineo Mizuno’s sculpture celebrates the beauty of wood in its natural state and emphasises its potential as a reusable and renewable resource. This site-specific work explores the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem, as well as the destruction of the forest and its potential for regeneration.