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

As the holidays kick-off in Los Angeles, 1 December also marks global World AIDS Day. Designed by artist Daniel Tobin, a new permanent monument in West Hollywood Park honors and memorializes those impacted by the disease. The late artist Robert Therrien’s five decade career in LA is being honored at The Broad with ‘This is a Story,’ and Alteronce Gumby takes a ‘Walk on the Moon’ at Jeffrey Deitch. Back in West Hollywood, Maxfield’s is the site for an exhibition showcasing the enduring appeal of antique Louis Vuitton trunks. ‘The art of travel’ features over 40 pieces on display in the Prouve House, with rare gems owned by Gypsy Rose Lee to Joel Grey, that will be on view until January 2026.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in December 2025

The AIDS Monument 

West Hollywood Park, permanent

With World AIDS Day on 1 December, the City of West Hollywood and the Foundation for the AIDS Monument (FAM) unveiled The AIDS Monument in West Hollywood Park to memorialize those impacted by HIV/AIDS, and will honor the community's activism and the personal stories. Designed by artist Daniel Tobin, the monument will feature a plaza, a donor wall, vertical bronze ‘traces’ with narrative text, integrated lighting reminiscent of a candlelight vigil, and a podium facing N. San Vicente Boulevard, that will function as a public art experience and memorial site.

if you came this way

Gagosian Beverly Hills until 20 December 2025

For more contemplation, new works by Edmund de Waal consist of porcelain vessels lyrically arranged in vitrines alongside glimpses of other materials, including gold, silver, lead, marble, aluminium, alabaster, and Kilkenny stone. These installations act as repositories of memory, archives, and language.

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad until 5 April 2026

This is a story, indeed. Featuring 120 artworks spanning five decades, including enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels – many made in Therrien’s downtown LA studio in his adopted home of Los Angeles, until his passing in 1990. This location was pivotal to his musings on scale, as the region's sprawling, open spaces allowed him to see the untapped potential of everyday objects. The show will include partial reconstructions of Therrien’s studio environment, like his project tables, drawings, and tools.

JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA

Marciano Art Foundation until April 2026

Marciano will reopen its second-floor Window Gallery with an exhibit devoted to the late poet, artist, and activist John Giorno. Known for transposing poetry into the visual, sonic, and performative, the exhibition spans Giorno's early prints to his later text paintings. Works from the 1960s through the 2010s reveal how he merged spiritual clarity with pop immediacy, and how language could heal and become physical. Notably, the exhibition will feature his landmark Dial-A-Poem (1969) recordings, newly reactivated to offer 24-hour access to more than 250 recordings by 132 poets, artists, musicians, and activists. Dial-A-Poem will be accessible through a physical landline within the exhibition, as well as through a QR code that guests may use through their own devices.

Being Home by Robert Gunderman

Wilding Cran until 21 December

With this exhibition, Gunderman explores the deep, often unseen mechanisms of the natural world through large - scale, vividly hued canvases that transform overlooked moments - a rising moon, a sprouting seed, a horizon line - into profound meditations on life, time, and transformation. Using rich, contrasting colors and recurring circular motifs, Gunderman dissolves traditional distinctions between landscape, symbol, and diagram, inviting viewers into an immersive visual language where boundaries are always in flux.

CHANEL KHOURY, Memory Bands

James Fuentes Gallery until 13 December 2025

Chanel Khoury’s work is deeply technical, driven by forces simultaneously slow, digital, ancient, and bright. This body of work finds its textures and forms in deep-sea beings, archeological holy sites, and computational glitches. The ctenophore (or comb jelly) is a central figure. Her oil paintings begin through a lengthy process of virtual world-building, intuiting an untouched world containing the primordial essence of life. Glistening, transparent forms resemble those found in the smallest markers and grandest phenomena of nature: spheres, spirals, columns, basins, and mirror-images. Bit by bit, Khoury meticulously transposes still images of this world into oil paint on canvas. Memory Bands represents works realized from this universe over the past two years, as well as site-responsive elements.

TJ Shin. Songs of Emerging Endangerment

Los Angeles State Historic Park until 22 February 2026

Songs of Emerging Endangerment by artist TJ Shin, commissioned by Clockshop, is a sound installation using mimicry to map systems of global migration. 50 participants connected to regions along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway were asked to imitate the calls of endangered bird species that travel the world’s largest bird migratory path. Installed at Los Angeles State Historic Park in a city shaped by Cold War–era urban planning and waves of migration from the Asia-Pacific, the project features a 30-foot-tall sculptural air raid siren that projects a composition of imitated bird calls scheduled throughout the day.  The installation is set to sound hourly from dawn to dusk. 

Walk on the Moon by Alteronce Gumby

Jeffrey Deitch until 17 January 2026

Alteronce’s first solo presentation with the gallery, is his most ambitious and multifaceted exhibition to date. The artist is recognized for expanding the possibilities of abstraction, bridging color theory, cosmology and physics to explore how light and material shape human perception. With Walk on the Moon, he sharpens this inquiry into a multisensory experience, presenting new works that invite viewers to explore color through both its material and energetic properties. Structured across four interwoven movements that encompass painting, sculpture, installation and sound, the exhibition extends Alteronce’s inquiry into how color can shape space, time and perception.

Kevin Umaña: Moonglow Metanoia

The Pitt until 20 December 2025

For his first solo in his hometown of Los Angeles, Umaña confronts his complex relationship with the city that shaped his youth. Coming out of the fog and looking back to marvel at the shape of the cloud, the artist offers a meditation on distance and perspective. The city’s light and atmosphere, specifically the haze and smog that both obscure and enhance its landscapes offered a unique perspective for the artist. Growing up in Los Angeles, Umaña recalls mornings and evenings where pollution and particulate matter shaped the sky into bands of orange, purple, and pink—reminders that something negative can produce something beautiful.

KAYLA WITT, In Circles, Still Forward

Night Gallery until 20 December 2025

This exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Kayla Witt is he first solo exhibition with the gallery following her inclusion in Superbloom at the gallery’s 2024 Frieze London presentation. Witt’s work befriends the unknown and the varied ways in which we approach the mysteries that surround us. Spanning ancient archetypes and new age mysticism, the artist maps our yearning for connectivity, understanding and self-actualization.  Witt’s latest body of work reveals a hunger for guidance, for belonging, for clarity and healing. Access to immaterial realms offered by posters and billboards highlight the ubiquity of ancient questions, commercialized in tchotchke form. Signage, symbols and talismans overlap and reinforce their common message by illustrating the persistence of invitations to step toward unchartered waters.

Kathleen Ryan Souvenir

Karma until 20 December 2025

The nine sculptures in Souvenir debuts two new bodies of work by Ryan. The first is a trio of cast-concrete peaches, their pits supplanted by engines. Their polished interiors and unfinished exteriors evoke the contrasting textures of the fruit’s flesh and skin. Heartthrob (all works 2025) is a Ford F-150’s powertrain embedded in a two-ton slice of solid concrete. Heartbreaker and Wild Heart iterate on the same sculptural logic. The latter’s sleek, half-exposed core is culled from a Harley Davidson, its twin cylinders echoing the two-sided structure of that titular organ. Ryan pulls everyday objects to the brink of uncanniness, revealing new formal and associative possibilities in turn. Not to be missed, Dreamhouse, is a rotting raspberry roughly the size of a minivan. This is the first fruit of its kind in the series for which Ryan is perhaps best known; the Bad Fruit sculptures epitomize the subversive play with material that is the crux of her artistic project.

Union Station by Yunghun Yoo

839 Gallery until 20 December 2025

For their ninth show, 839 Gallery has mounted a solo exhibition by Yunghun Yoo, an LA-based Korean-American artist. Union Station is comprised of thirteen paintings largely premised on the physical and psychological space of the commuter train. His practice engages concepts of balance, displacement, and the unstable boundaries of identity, space, and perception. Yoo’s practice draws from a multicultural and migratory perspective to shape his nomadic worldview.

Monuments

Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art, Little Tokyo, until 3 May 2026

Inspired by the wave of repulsion after the turbulent 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., that opposed the removal of a local statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. 200 other tributes across the country to American turncoats who supported slavery have also been removed. A selection of decommissioned Confederate statues will be shown at MOCA and alternative space The Brick (on N. Western in the Melrose Hill area), joint organizers of the exhibition, paired with contemporary work by Bethany Collins, Stan Douglas, Leonardo Drew, Jon Henry, Martin Puryear, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker and a dozen other artists, borrowed and commissioned for the occasion.

A Tender Excavation

Lace at Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, until 21 February 2026

Curated by Selene Preciado this exhibit approaches research-based artistic practices through propositions of alternative histories, bringing together a group of artists who work with historical and familial photographic archives as a point of departure to construct new narratives and elicit transformation. Artists featured in the exhibition include Zeynep Abes, Susu Attar, Jamil G Baldwin, Mely Barragán, Artemisa Clark, Arleene Correa Valencia, Mercedes Dorame, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Leah King, Tarrah Krajnak, Heesoo Kwon, Ann Le, Arlene Mejorado, Star Montana, and Camille Wong.

Land marks

PACE Gallery until 17 January 2026

Curated by Joshua Friedman, a Vice President at Pace, this group exhibition of new and recent works by 17 artists is centering on notions of selfhood as they relate to space and place. The presentation will spotlight emerging artists, including several LA-based artists, and situate intergenerational figures in dialogue with one another. This will include over 25 artworks, with a strong emphasis on painting, by Jarvis Boyland, Chioma Ebinama, Janiva Ellis, Jake Grewal, Loie Hollowell, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Li Hei Di, Sophia Loeb, Sarah Martin-Nuss, Marina Perez Simão, Nathlie Provosty, Anne Rothenstein, Kate Spencer Stewart, Reika Takebayashi, Salman Toor, Janaina Tschäpe, and Shiwen Wang.

Horror

Sprüth Magers from 14 November, 2025 until 14 February 2026

While this exhibit of ‘Horror’ is taking place after Halloween, it proves that the theme never really dies for fans of the genre. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers have pulled together a group exhibition organized by Jill Mulleady featuring an intergenerational group of artists. The exhibition presents horror as both symptom and strategy, illuminating seen and unseen forces that inscribe themselves on human experience. Channelling our deepest anxieties whether evoking Cold War paranoia, civil rights conflicts, radiation fears, surveillance anxieties, or the existential dread and hyperreality of our times, the works in the exhibition quietly surface the intimate, often suppressed tensions embedded within collective and individual realities.

Robert Rauschenberg: Celebrating Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration

Gemini G.E.L. until 19 December 2025

Honoring the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, this exhibit highlights more than 50 works and his remarkable four-decade collaboration with Gemini. The publisher, artists’ workshop and gallery began a relationship with the artist in February 1967, when Rauschenberg travelled to the emerging Los Angeles publisher to embark on his first project. This collaboration was marked by experimentation and invention and shunned limitations. His first edition, Booster, conceived as ‘a self-portrait of inner man,’ was intended to include a single, full-body X-ray. When this proved technically impossible, Rauschenberg and Gemini’s founders adapted and the artist was scanned in six sections, resulting in a monumental print over six feet tall.

R. Crumb 'Tales of Paranoia'

David Zwirner until 20 December 2025

For his first exhibition in Los Angeles in over fifteen year, new drawings and prints by iconic illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb, "Tales of Paranoia" reflects on life in his eighties spanning his sixty-year career as well as themes of personal and mass paranoia during these times of social and political unrest. Crumb’s most mordant attacks are, as always, reserved for himself and show him contending with his own manic anxieties in a humorous and insightful manner. The exhibition was later presented as part of the 55th Venice Biennale.

Marilyn Minter

Regen Projects from 6 November until 20 December 2025

For Marilyn Minter's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, expect to see paintings from four separate but related bodies of work: large-scale portraits of peers like Nick Cave and Cindy Sherman, the Odalisque and After Guston series, and a selection of her iconic magnified mouths. Across the exhibition, Minter recommences her signature, hyperrealist style while entering into dialogue with art history, addressing a stream of present-day social and political concerns. Also at the gallery, Minter's portraits of Jeff Koons, and Jane Fonda, along with her Odalisque portrait series that shows Lizzo and Padma Lakshmi with assertive gazes and poses.

'Flora Yukhnovich. Bacchanalia'

Hauser & Wirth DTLA until 18 January 2026

For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and debut with Hauser & Wirth, British artist Flora Yukhnovich will present a new series of large-scale canvases prompted by the centuries old theme of Bacchanalia. In these canvases, lush, swirling brushstrokes evoke the dynamism and intense corporality of both ancient and contemporary hedonism, a past of satyric excesses and a present of consumerism and popular culture glut. The artist is celebrated for taking inspiration from art historical genres ranging from French rococo and Italian baroque to abstract expressionism, for paintings that celebrate materiality and process through shifting, chimerical forms.

Made in L.A. 2025

Hammer Museum from 5 October until 1 March 2026

Celebrating the diverse and unique LA artists, for the seventh iteration of the Hammer’s signature biennial exhibition showcasing artists practicing throughout the greater Los Angeles area. 28 participants in the exhibition present work not only made in the city but also grounded in its complex and unfolding terrain. The works include film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. Each engages with this city in ways alternately literal, formal, material, and metaphoric from Freddy Villalobos to Alonzo Davis, Gabriela Ruiz and David Alekhuogie.

Gold: Enduring Power, Sacred Craft

Norton Simon Museum, 24 October 2025 until 16 February 2026

To commemorate the Museum’s 50th anniversary, the exhibition features 60 stunning works that highlight gold’s cultural and material resilience across time and place and reexamines gold not just as a material of beauty, but as a transformative force that has shaped civilizations, and ignited passions. Organized by Associate Curator Maggie Bell and Assistant Curator Lakshika Senarath Gamage, it uncovers the intersections between value, artistry, and power. In addition, ‘Recollections: Stories from the Norton Simon Museum,’ is a new book that to uncovers the museum’s evolution through thirteen essays, each centered on a remarkable work of art or collection.

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philp Guston

Skirball Cultural Center, from 16 October 2025 until 1 March 2026

The work of American-born painter Philip Guston, the child of Jewish immigrants from Odessa (present-day Ukraine), and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a leading Black contemporary artist based in Houston, Texas, in dialogue for the first time. The exhibition features key works by Guston, including his now-iconic, late satirical Ku Klux Klan paintings, in dialogue with major works Hancock created in response to his inspirational mentor, highlighting their parallel thematic explorations of the nature of evil, self-representation, otherness, and art activism.

The Day Tomorrow Began

LACMA from 12 October 2025 until 29 March 2026

For his upcoming solo at LACMA (his largest in LA and most ambitious to date) Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan takes on alarming efforts to censor institutions and rewrite American history by asking: What happens if, instead of hiding and obscuring the past, we spotlight it and reflect it back on itself?

Strachan does exactly that across his signature immersive installations (including a barbershop, a laundromat, and a rice field) and monumental sculptures, he invites the public to critically rethink the ways in which we represent, discuss, commemorate, and celebrate history, and which histories at that. This exhibit coincides with the lead up to the opening of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries, housing the 3,000+ works from the museum’s encyclopedic collection. (Later in the month, Strachan’s modern take on commemorative structures will also be on view at MOCA.)

Flesh of the Forest

Oxy Art, Highland Park, until 13 December 2025

Occidental College's public art space, rooted in social justice and community engagement, is showcasing a group exhibition curated by curator and critic Tiffany E. Barber. Flesh of the Forest brings together nine contemporary artists from the African diaspora whose work engages with the forest through sculpture, painting, film, and installation, as a rich, multilayered site of history, memory, sensation, and feeling. Those include the works of Jonathan Barber, Sydney Cain, Jerome Dent, Jr., Mario Lewis, Simphiwe Ndzube, Josèfa Ntjam, Alicia Piller, Reuben Telushkin, and Reyson Velásquez.

In Bloom: Flowers in Contemporary Art

Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale until 15 February 2026

The timeless floral theme is on display for a group exhibition exploring contemporary approaches. The media and artworks vary dramatically, with paintings, sculptures, installation, and video that range from naturalistic to abstract, and from playful to contemplative. New works by most of the artists include David Flores, DABSMYLA, Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Ruscha, Simonette David Jackson,
Jasmyn Marie, Analia Saban, Kim Schoen, and Tiffanie Turner, with new works by most artists.

Les soñadores

REDCAT, DTLA until 20 December 2025

REDCAT is the Roy and Edna Disney CALARTS theatre in DTLA and a center for innovative visual, performing, and media arts. Les soñadores is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Maravilla, who migrated alone from El Salvador during the civil war as a child, creates an environment for healing and storytelling, retracing his own journey while connecting to broader narratives of migration, trauma, and resilience, while combining sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation.

Jaws: The Exhibition

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures until 26 July 2026

For a final end-of-the-summer fling, Jaws: The Exhibition - in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, will be the largest presentation ever mounted for the Oscar® winning Steven Spielberg classic and feature scene breakdowns, interactive experiences, behind-the-scenes stories, and some 200 original objects, many never before put on public display. And, yes, it’s still terrifying 50-years later.

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.

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.

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.