The day has finally arrived for the ribbon-cutting ceremony and pre-opening of the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA with a big bash on 19 April. This will be followed by a series of members’ events, and a public opening of the permanent collection that includes Diego Rivera to Vincent van Gogh. Other monumental openings include Lauren Halsley erecting a sculpture park in South Central; Mary Ta of Mass Beverly opening a new gallery space on Third Street that will feature rotating exhibits; and Mexican artist Aldo Álvarez Tostado’s first U.S. solo show is taking place at Blackman Cruz in Hollywood.
Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in April 2026
David Geffen Galleries
LACMA 19 April, permanent
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will open the Peter Zumthor designed David Geffen Galleries on 19 April with a ribbon-cutting celebration, marking the beginning of two weeks of priority member access to the galleries as well as a series of events. From April 19 through May 3, LACMA members and donors will have the opportunity to see the inaugural installation of the museum’s Blue Chip collection. On Sunday, May 3, the museum will offer a free day of activities and access to the galleries for NexGenLA, a free youth membership for L.A. County residents 17 years and younger.
Jonas Wood
Gagosian until 25 April 2026
Timed to the Indian Wells Open, out in greater Palm Springs, Wood’s tenth exhibition at Gagosian, features all new tennis-themed paintings. This subject has been a rare part of Wood’s practice, but it has been expanded considerably for this new body of work. The paintings emerged from watching matches on television in his studio and photographing them on his iPhone.
In a distinct abstracted style, each painting represents a match held at a prominent Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), or Olympic tournament. The paintings continue a series that Wood began in 2011, furthering his approach to the theme of sports while also engaging with abstraction and Pop art.
Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages
The Getty until 19 April 2026
The Biblical story of Creation was visualized, represented, and interpreted in the Middle Ages and through Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosale’s works, shows how it is interpreted in reclamation. These pieces will live in the section dedicated to the Creation of Eve and puts medieval artworks and texts in dialogue with her contemporary work. A highlight of the exhibition will be the debut of a new piece by the artist, created in response to the Getty’s Stammheim Missal, a significant work in the Museum’s collection. The presentation represents Rosales’s first major collaboration with Getty.
Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials
Hammer Museum until 23 August 2026
This groundbreaking exhibition features 22 indigenous and brown artists using organic and living materials from cacao, tree bark, avocado, and lemon to examine and expose the ongoing political discourse.
Characterized by their diversity and internationality (50% of the artists are indigenous, while the other 50% consider themselves part of the brown cultures.) Some of the participating LA-based artists commissioned for their work include Raven Chacon - the first Native American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music; Carmen Argote, Jackie Amezquita, Edgar Calel, Rose B. Simpson, among others.
MARYTA& HENRYTIMI
HENTRYTIMI Los Angeles, until 30 June 2026
Mary Ta, the Los Angeles–based design visionary has launched MARYTA& – a new curated gallery and international platform for the exhibition and presentation of design objects, installations, and concepts. Established to encourage collaboration, collecting, discovery, and education, the gallery will celebrate and share the work of multiple cultural and creative forces.
HENRYTIMI los angeles, an installation of functional artworks, rooted in nature, and made by hand in Italy, that spans a gallery space of 8,000 square feet that include artworks made with natural stone rock on burnished brass metal, and a rare thermopolium made out of solid stone with black volcanic clay vessels that was inspired by ancient Romans and the ruins of Pompeii.
Simultaneously, MARYTA& also unveiled The HENGE Collectors Lounge, an immersive, refined and material-driven environment designed by Ugo Cacciatori featuring modular seating, cast-metal tables, and a sculptural quartzite bar at her former MASS Beverly Blvd. space.
The Holding Vessel
ALTA until 12 April 2026
For this two-person exhibition featuring Nana Kuromiya and Derek Weisberg, whose works consider the vessel—both literal and symbolic—as a site where the fragility and persistence of life are held. Together, their works create a contemplative dialogue in which vessels—whether landscape, body, or form—become frameworks for reflecting on life’s cycles, giving fleeting experiences lasting presence.
Kuromiya’s paintings unfold within shallow vessel-like supports that contain flowing oils and beeswax, evoking mythic and ecological narratives drawn from ancient Japanese cosmologies. Her layered surfaces suggest worlds in flux, where transformation and impermanence are inherent. Weisberg’s ceramic sculptures similarly function as vessels for human experience, carrying vulnerability, grief, and reflection. In his newest work, he introduces Wishing Wells—participatory vessels that begin empty and are activated through the gestures of viewers, who place coins or offerings within them, transforming them into instruments of reflection, hope, and generosity.
Sarah Robarts
Bayside Hotel in Santa Monica until 1 May 2026
Located on the Santa Monica shore, the Bayside Hotel is hosting Uganda-born, Kenya-raised artist Robarts’ symbolic installation of reclaimed and painted, mixed-media surfboards. These objects inherently carry history within their fiberglass and foam. Having been shaped by salt, sun, and time, each board serves as both material and muse. Rather than obscuring their past, Robarts preserves elements of each board’s original surface, allowing traces of history to remain visible and creating a dialogue between past and present. Using a deliberate, layered painting technique, earlier gestures remain visible beneath subsequent layers, emphasizing the tension between concealment and exposure. The work explores themes of memory, transformation, and renewal. On land, these boards stand as markers or guardians, holding the memory of motion, risk, joy, and surrender. By reclaiming and repainting these boards, the installation extends their lifecycle while honoring the coastline that shaped them.
Rancho Futuro
Blackman Cruz until 30 April, 2026
Mexican artist, architect, and designer Aldo Álvarez Tostado’s first U.S. solo show is taking place at Blackman Cruz in Hollywood. The sculptural and functional pieces in the exhibition ‘opens a portal across time, space, and borders, on how nation and manhood are manufactured fictions.’ Rancho Futuro dares to imagine: What if the Hispanic colonization of Mexico had gone wayward? What if California had never seceded? What would Los Angeles look like; what objects would mark its everyday rituals of desire, symbolism, and meaning? The answer is both monumental and domestic with a dark, seductive vision of a tomorrow that never came, rendered in materials that ritualize the everyday and insist on touch from horsehair, hand-cut obsidian, chiselled leather, clay, volcanic stone, and raw metal.
The artist draws on the eclecticism of neo-colonial and neo-prehispanic architecture that fascinated both Mexican and Californian artists at the turn of the 20th century; the handmade sensibilities of mid-century Mexican modernism; and the brutalist monumentality of the 1970s -80s in the work of Agustín Hernández and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Into this mix, he weaves a cinematic lineage that stretches from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to Nicolás Echeverría’s Cabeza de Vaca or Jordan Peele’s Nope.
Free and Queer: Black Californian Roots of Gay Liberation
California African American Museum, 7 April until 28 February 2027
This exhibit centers Los Angeles as a foundational site of Black queer cultural power, shaped through networks of resistance across neighborhoods, institutions, and grassroots communities. Curated by Susan D. Anderson, the exhibition foregrounds the role of Black queer cultural labor, bringing into focus a history that has often been left out of both mainstream LGBTQ+ narratives and dominant accounts of the civil rights movement. At a moment when queer history and representation are under renewed political pressure, the exhibition feels especially timely and urgent.
Paul McCarthy - CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach, and A&E, Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve, Samples
The Journal Gallery until 25 April 2026
For the gallery’s first exhibition with artist Paul McCarthy, that opened during Frieze, two ongoing series collide, CSSC, Coach Stage Stage Coach, and A&E, Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve. Both bodies of work serve as remnants of and counterparts to filmed performances in which McCarthy himself performs in character as a banker (in CSSC) and Adolf Hitler (in A&E). The exhibition will include paintings, drawings, and two sculptures depicting the corpses of the aforementioned characters, and include never before seen pieces including a large scale diptych.
John Willenbecher
Babst Gallery until 18 April 2026
New Works, is a solo exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by the artist and is his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 1972. The exhibition includes a series of new works, each of which is entitled Object. The pieces are made of acrylic paint and circles of metallic leaf on fiberboard. Born in PA Dutch country in the 1930s, the new material was made in the artist’s Tribeca loft from 2022-2025, and were inspired by his lifelong passions of children’s games, astronomy, and the underlying Euclidean forms in Renaissance Tondos. Willenbecher’s work was also shown in the Boxes show at Virginia Dwan, alongside Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes debut in 1964.
Hard n’ Soft
Brodin Gallery until 11 April 2026
Creative partners Gavin and Kelley Brodin are opening their dedicated Formed For studio alongside the debut of Brodin Gallery, bringing their trade-driven sculptural practice and fine art work into a shared, purpose-built location. Launched during Frieze Los Angeles, this opening marks the launch of the inaugural exhibition, Hard n’ Soft, a group show examining tension and transformation in contemporary materials co-curated by art works and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery.
‘Arshile Gorky. Horizon West’
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood until 25 April 2026
Horizon West tells the story of the summer of 1941 when Arshile Gorky, his soon-to-be wife Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder and Isamu Noguchi drove across country from New York City to Los Angeles over a two-week time period. This marked Gorky’s first visit to California since arriving in America as an Armenian refugee in 1920. Focused on the transformative impact of this journey, ‘Horizon West’ will present a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before, during and after the transcontinental trip, tracing the development of his incomparable approach to the genre as a 20th-century visionary and leader of the abstract movement.
Christina Quarles. The Ground Glows Black
Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles until 3 May 2026
Christina Quarles’ latest body of work reflects the acute sense of displacement she experienced in the wake of the historic Los Angeles wildfires that consumed her home in early 2025. Already admired internationally for the dexterity and assertiveness with which she manipulates paint, ‘The Ground Glows Black,’ pushes that expressive and physical power to new limits, conveying the impact of the fires on her inner landscape.
Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection
Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles 16 August 2026
Eileen Harris Norton has built an inspiring art collection and forged a philanthropic legacy by focusing upon the work of women artists, as well as artists of color and of her native California. Marking fifty years since Harris Norton made her first acquisition - a print purchased in 1976 directly from Los Angeles artist and African American arts advocate Ruth Waddy, ‘Destiny Is a Rose’ will present more than 80 works from Harris Norton’s holdings in an exhibition conceived to celebrate the connoisseurship and commitment to social justice.
Taking its title from a 1990 painting by Kerry James Marshall, ‘Destiny Is a Rose’ features paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Catherine Opie, Yoshitomo Nara, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, and many others.
FACTORY DOOMSCROLL
Night Gallery until 4 April 2026
This two-person exhibition of new work by San Francisco-based artist Christine Tien Wang and Albuquerque-based artist Rachel Youn, opened during Frieze LA. Wang has been showing work at the gallery for over a decade, while this is Youn’s second major exhibition, following ‘Well Adjusted’ in 2023.
In two of Wang's paintings, Luigi Mangione – the accused assassin of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson – is rendered holy. Both artists revel in the exhaustive gestures of contemporary life – the perpetual motion that leads nowhere. They both take objects designed for instant gratification, whether physical comfort or viral dopamine hits, and trap them in a kind of amber, forcing us to reckon with what we consume and discard. Wang and Youn's collaboration serves as a testament to the excess that comes with contemporary Western living.
Under One Roof
Santa Monica Studios 3026 until 3 May 2026
The Santa Monica Studios 3026 at the Airport Arts Center launched with a dynamic multi-disciplinary group exhibition curated by acclaimed Los Angeles art critic and curator Peter Frank. Harnessing the creative energy of Santa Monica’s largest artist community, featuring 32 resident artists working in sculpture, painting, textile, photography, ceramics, prints, and drawing. This expansive show, ‘Under One Roof,’ celebrates nearly 25 years of artistic innovation for the center.
Mourning's Orbit
Night Gallery until 4 April, 2026
On the one year anniversary of the Eaton Canyon wildfire, this new body of paintings by LA artist Mira Dancy, who is an Altadena resident, and is still in the midst of instability and rebuilding her life. She has a temporary studio, and she and her family have been in-between hotels and homes. Her new work bears witness to the devastation wrought by the fire, and this will be the artist's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
For Frieze Los Angeles, Night Gallery will present British painter and elected Royal Academician Clare Woods new body of wet-into-wet paintings on aluminum, inspired by a recent visit to The Huntington Gardens in Pasadena.
Veronica Fernandez: Prey
Anat Ebgi Gallery until 4 April, 2026
For the first big solo exhibition of new work by emerging Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez, her autobiographical paintings are rooted in memory, inspired by the financial difficulty and homelessness in her upbringing, living in various temporary housing solutions. She uses old photographs as a starting point and her figures occupy real spaces: families in LA motel rooms, kids playing in gas stations or construction sites. Veronica is also a co-founder of Ignite The Hearts Foundation, where she provides crucial support to LA families experiencing homelessness.
For Frieze Los Angeles, Anat Ebgi Gallery will show work by Mexican artist Anabel Juárez, among others. Her work deals with topics of migration and the recent ICE raids in LA, and she will debut new work as part of her ongoing series of ceramic pots, plants and flowers.
Diary of a Fly
Barnsdall Art Park’s Hollyhock House, until 25 April 2026
Located within the grounds of Barnsdall Art Park, Ryan Preciado's installation at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House is significant for a myriad of reasons - one being the landmark home was in danger of closing due to funding cuts, but is still open to the public. Installed throughout the landmark structure, Preciado’s textiles–his first in the medium–and sculptures are titled after a late-1930s musical composition by Béla Bartók that imitates the frenzied pace of a fly. The music’s repetitive motifs and observation of the everyday resonates with Preciado’s approach to his site-responsive exhibition, which builds on Hollyhock House’s one-hundred year history as a platform for artists and experimentation. Preciado’s work has recently been featured locally at the Hammer ‘Made in LA’ exhibition.
Wally Hedrick: Sex Politics Religion
Parker Gallery and The Box, until 4 April, 2026
The Box and Parker Gallery are concurrently presenting a full-scale retrospective, spanning from the 1950s to the early 2000s, by the iconoclastic California artist Wally Hedrick (1928–2003). Hedrick, who was born in Pasadena and died in Bodega Bay, CA, was a pivotal figure of the San Francisco Beat Generation. In 1954, he co-founded the legendary Six Gallery in San Francisco. Hedrick conceived and organized an important poetry event at the gallery, held on October 7, 1955, in which Allen Ginsberg publicly read ‘Howl’ for the very first time, heralding the San Francisco Renaissance and West Coast literary revolution. In 1959, Hedrick and his wife, Jay DeFeo, were included in Sixteen Americans at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, alongside Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella.
At Frieze, Parker Gallery will be showcasing new paintings by Marley Freeman in collaboration with Textile Artifacts, the artist’s family run business located in Los Angeles, CA. The presentation at Frieze precedes a solo exhibition with Marley Freeman at the gallery in the fall.
everything was once something else
OXY ARTS until 11 April, 2026
OXY ARTS, Occidental College's public art space rooted in social justice and community engagement is mounting a solo exhibition by 2025-26 Wanlass Artist in Residence Roksana Pirouzmand. This body of work considers the Los Angeles-based artist’s ongoing inquiry into transformation, interconnectedness, and impermanence. Working with clay and metal, materials born of the earth and shaped by fire, Pirouzmand explores their contrasting qualities. Across her practice, matter becomes a conduit for thinking about cause and effect, fragility and force, and the ways energy moves between bodies, materials, and environments. Presented across two sites, JOAN and OXY ARTS, with staggered openings, the exhibition features a series of new sculptural works linked through vibration and sound.
Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70
Hammer Museum
Part I: until 17 May 2026
Part II: June 7 – October 25, 2026
The Hammer Museum at UCLA is presenting a two-part exhibition celebrating the 70th anniversary of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. With more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books, the center’s collection of works on paper is among the most significant in the United States. Part One, features nearly 100 works reflecting the breadth of the collection, from the Renaissance to present day, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vassily Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, Ansel Adams, Elizabeth Catlett, Corita Kent, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, and Vija Celmins.
The Art of the Album – The Photography of Danny Clinch
Wrensilva on Melrose Ave. until Spring 2026
For a completely immersive experience, Wrensilva LA Listening Studio on Melrose has launched a photo and listening installation with more than three decades of music culture and lifestyle photography by Danny Clinch. This installation brings iconic images together with the album covers they helped define, plus the vinyl itself, played on a Wrensilva record console. It’s a rare chance to stand inside the relationship between image, artist, and record. Featured artists include 2Pac, Johnny Cash, Foo Fighters, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, and more, that reveal living documents of artists in their element, images that become inseparable from the songs, the albums, and the eras they helped shape.
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.
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.
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.
Jaws: The Exhibition
Robert Shaw as Quint during production of Jaws (1975)
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.
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.