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

Read our pick of the best Los Angeles art exhibitions to see this month, from Grateful Dead band photography at David Kordansky Gallery to garden sculptures by Michael Wilding at Hotel Bel Air

Los Angeles art exhibitions Ron Rakow
Jerry Garcia performing in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA, 1967 - 2025
archival giclée print, Courtesy of the artist, Retro Photo Archive, and David Kordansky Galleryjpg
Ron Rakow Jerry Garcia performing in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA, 1967 - 2025 archival giclée print
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist, Retro Photo Archive, and David Kordansky Galleryjpg)

While half of Los Angeles will be at Burning Man in Blackrock, Nevada, later this August, the other half of art-loving patrons will be at The Aspen Art Fair during Aspen Art Week in Colorado, gaining in momentum for its second year with co-founder and director Becca Hoffman at the helm. Taking place at the historic Hotel Jerome until the first week of August, with over forty international exhibitors and specially-curated artist-in-residence projects, along with an exclusive studio visit with artist Catherine Opie at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, offering insight into her practice and current work.

Other exhibits to see in early August before closing include Y.Z. Kami’s The Domes paintings at Gagosian Beverly Hills, and a Grateful Dead photo retrospective at David Kordansky, with plenty of time to wander the Hotel Bel Air garden sculptures by Sante Fe artist Michael Wilding for the into the fall.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in August 2025

Empress of Night

Marcel Dzama Empress of Night

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

David Zwirner, Melrose Hill, until 8 August 2025

Canadian-born artist Marcel Dzama’s recent works are a fantastical-visions of a world where anthropomorphized animals and dancing figures are set against dense junglescapes and expansive skies. References to Francisco Goya and surrealist poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) are evident throughout these compositions, suggesting parallels between the war-torn and uncertain eras in which those artists lived. Some works make direct reference to the rise of authoritarianism in the world today and on growing threats to democracy and human rights. Dzama is known for a nocturnal working style, so many of the works are set against dark skies that contain celestial visions of stars and moons that evoke a sense of joy and wonder, suggesting hope even during times of unrest.

An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965–1995

Ron Rakow, Grateful Dead in San Francisco, CA, 1967 - 2025 Featured in the catalog An American Beauty_ Grateful Dead, 1965–1995, Courtesy of the arPst, Retro Photo Archive, and David Kordansky Gallery

Ron Rakow, Grateful Dead in San Francisco, CA, 1967 - 2025 Featured in the catalog An American Beauty_ Grateful Dead, 1965–1995

(Image credit: Courtesy of the arPst, Retro Photo Archive, and David Kordansky Gallery)

David Kordansky Gallery until 16 August 2025

Timed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the band, as well as the release of a major new publication of the same name, ‘dead heads’ can explore the two rooms filled with photographs of the iconic psychedelic rock band curated by photographer Jay Blakesberg and his daughter, Ricki Blakesberg. Photographs in the exhibit features 28 large-scale and 32 smaller photographic prints documenting all eras of the brand experience and include images by Ron Rakow who served as part of the Grateful Dead’s management team during the late 1960s and early ’70s, and photographer and storyteller Rosie McGee, also an iconic member of the band’s early inner circle and family. Spanning 30 years of milestones, the images offer a sweeping view of an influential segment of American cultural production during pivotal decades of political, social, cultural, and creative transformation. ‘An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965–1995’ coffee table book is available for pre-order through the David Kordansky Gallery shop and will be officially released on 1 August in honor of the late frontman Jerry Garcia’s birthday.

Lily van der Stokker

Lily van der Stokker

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Parker Gallery, 16 August 2025

For the second solo exhibition with Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker, known for her large-scale wall paintings and rendered drawings, this exhibition’s focus is paintings on canvas that expand upon the universal themes central to her practice, including genuine acts of human kindness. Undergirding all of van der Stokker’s work is a radically conceptual and personal approach to art making that centers femininity, joy and otherwise mundane aspects of everyday life that are typically dismissed as frivolous. Her intentional use of soft fluorescent colors and youthful imagery, is a cheeky nod towards art’s self-seriousness and a subversion of its expectations. Flowers are the primary motif in the exhibition, and have been employed consistently throughout the artist’s practice for over thirty years.

Srklet

Maja Ruznic at Karma

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Karma until 13 September 2025

Delve into artist Maja Ruznic works on paper of morphing shapes, chimerical figures, and saturated color which she describes describes as ‘portals,’ apertures inviting the viewer into her fantastical world. Painted with acrylic-based gouache on raw Khadi paper, this body of work is an essential part of the artist’s practice that entails working small at the beginning of each day in the studio allowing the freedom to summon new images from her unconscious. The first exhibition dedicated solely to this vital component of her work - titled after a Bosnian word that describes a vast psychological ache, presents a selection made this year where color and form fuse into investigations of the mystical, the emotional, and the historical.

The Way of the Japanese Bath

Yukimi (Snow Gazing), Ginzan Onsen, Japan 2018

Yukimi (Snow Gazing), Ginzan Onsen, Japan 2018

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Leica Gallery LA until 1 September 2025

LA-based award-winning photographer and author Mark Edward Harris has visited all seven continents and photographed in more than 100 countries. His work has appeared in publications from Vanity Fair and National Geographic Traveler to Newsweek and The London Times Travel Magazine. He is the recipient of dozens of awards including a CLIO Award for advertising photography and a Sports Photographer of the Year Gold Award for his Tokyo 2020 Olympic coverage. He has also collaborated with interior designer Kelly Wearstler on ‘Domicilium Decoratus’ (Harper/Collins) and ‘Hue’ (Ammo Books). Taken from Harris’ highly praised book (now in its 3rdedition), ‘The Way of the Japanese Bath,’ this exhibit includes images from the artist’s extensive time living and traveling through Japan capturing a centuries-old tradition of bathing. The images are ethereal, provocative and at times haunting.

Creatrix

Nora Berman - Tree of life - 2024-2025 (1)

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Babst Gallery, Fairfax District, until 23 August 2025

Los Angeles-based artist Nora Berman’s solo exhibition of oil paintings, works on paper, and ceramics are presented alongside video sculptures informed by her live streaming practice. Regularly since 2021, Berman broadcasts immersive, experimental livestreams from her studio, where she paints, performs, and co-exists with her viewers in a bizarre environment shaped by her own visual art.

Ground Work

ABa-01 Echoes (NYT May 8 2025), 2025_AL

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Sean Kelly until 30 August 2025

This new group show is curated by Joey Lico – executive director of The Cultivist – who brings together fifteen artists (many of them based in LA) whose practices explore the deeper, often invisible forces that shape landscape: memory, pressure, absence, and time through photography, sculpture, painting, and installation ‘This isn’t a show about landscape,’ Lico says. ‘It’s about what it means to inhabit one.’ Anchored by Marcel Duchamp’s haunting 1920 photograph Dust Breeding, the show asks: What do we leave behind—and how does it continue to shape the world we live in? The show features work by artists including Dionne Lee, Cauleen Smith, Athena LaTocha, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Harold Mendez, among others.

Garden of Eve

Angie Crabtree Long Beach Musuem

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Long Beach Museum of Art until 27 September 2025

On the heels of her very first large-scale mural, on the facade of Renaissance High School for the Arts, Angie Crabtree also has her first solo museum show in Long Beach. A fine artist globally recognized for her hyperrealist gem portraits collected by brands like De Beers and Chopard, she is also a former high school art teacher that brings a personal connection to the students and aims to create a mural which will inspire and empower. Her work, known for exploring femininity, power, and opulence through gemstone imagery, takes on new scale and context here and embodies how fine art and street art can converge to create lasting impact.

What delineates the edge

art

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Regen Projects until 16 August 2025

New York-based visual artist Kevin Beasley’s solo exhibition conceptually focuses on thresholds, or the porous membranes between objects and their cultural or historical associations. Freestanding resin screens embedded with bedsheets, uniforms, and denim give material form to the weight of American history, using tactile preservation to reflect on Blackness and the American South. Wall-mounted Synths suspend cotton, pool cues, PPE, and more in vibrant resin panels—transforming personal and cultural materials into abstract compositions that surface hidden histories.

Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy

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(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Hauser & Wirth DTLA until 5 October 2025

Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Luchita Hurtado (1920 – 2020) committed to a lifelong journey of personal and artistic evolution defined by ceaseless experimentation. The first exhibition devoted to the artist at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, ‘Yo Soy’ (I Am) brings together paintings and drawings from a pivotal moment in Hurtado’s work the course of her eight-decade career. Inspired by the surge of feminist activism in LA, the artist held her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in February 1974, debuting her Linear Language series of expressive, geometric word paintings. This exhibit revisits that landmark presentation and includes never-before-seen works from the series it introduced.

Curvature

Michael Wildling at Hotel Bel Air

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Hotel Bel-Air until 9 November 2025

In a partnership with Wilding Cran Gallery, Ackerman Studios and CURA Art are showcasing an exhibition of sculptures by Santa Fe-based artist, Michael Wilding. The works are dotted around the lush bucolic grounds and gardens of Hotel Bel-Air near the iconic lily pond with floating swans in the hills above Sunset Blvd. Part of the exhibition series ‘Spatial Elegance –Timeless Horizons’ draws inspiration from the tranquil environs, the interplay of light, and the expansive Californian sky, the presentations will create an immersive and meditative experience. For artist Michael Wilding, sculpting is ‘an improvisational journey and a dialogue with stone.’ This philosophy casts light on his latest exhibition, where he draws inspiration from shapes formed by earth, wind and water.

Why Did I Say Yes?

Viraj Khanna_Photoshoot time

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Rajiv Menon Contemporary until 30 August 2025

The first solo exhibit on the West Coat by Viraj Khanna, one of India’s most exciting young artists under 30, examines the global phenomenon of the Indian Wedding. The exhibition playfully satirizes the rituals and motivations that drive this celebration while encompassing the personal and political, featuring vibrant and maximalist embroideries, tapestries and textile works, which recreate scenes from Khanna’s life navigating the wedding circuit.

The son of major fashion designer Anamika Khanna, the artist grew up immersed in the Indian fashion world, and observing how the big Indian wedding has become a site of aspiration, consumption, and identity-making across South Asia and its diasporas. ‘Indian Weddings have become a global fixation point, an aesthetic aspiration amplified by social media,’ said Khanna. ‘Wedding culture is the perfect playground for me to explore the topics that I have always been the most intrigued by in my work: excess, conspicuous consumption, and self-mythologizing in the age of Instagram.’

Primordial Procession

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(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

ALTA until 10 August 2025

This group exhibition highlights the works of Olive Diamond, Kuniko Kinoto, Suguru Iwasaka, Seiji Nagai, and Tâm Van Tran - some of whom are exhibiting in the United States for the first time.

Primordial Procession is a collective passage—part exhibition, part contemplation—that channels the raw, elemental forces that have shaped our world since time immemorial. The artists lead us through landscapes of fictionalized and seemingly familiar memories, grounded in the natural world. The imagery functions like ancient glyphs, inviting interpretation through unexpected connections and reminding us that the image remains one of the earliest—and most enduring—forms of communication. Working in paint, glass, rock, and ceramic, the artists trace nature’s deep currents, creating a visual glossary—one that can be reassembled into a language at once familiar, renewed, and enduring.

Sharon Ellis

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(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Michael Kohn Gallery until 9 August 2025

California-based artist Sharon Ellis’ visionary, intimate, and imaginatively poetic landscapes are on display in the exhibition of recent works developed over the past 5 years, merging symmetrical composition with brilliant, glossy colors hovering in the realm of the sublime. Art for Ellis is ultimately a spiritual practice, harkening back to 19th-century aesthetic principles and craftsmanship. She said, ‘I feel that my work follows in the tradition of love for the natural world, obsession with the painted universes we create, and a reverence for the mystery of imagination itself.’

Francis Picabia: Femmes

Francis Picabia Femmes

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills, until 1 September 2025

This exhibition of paintings by the French modern master Francis Picabia (b. 1879 in Paris, d. 1953 in Paris), starts in the 1920s and extends into the 1950s, charting the last three decades of Picabia’s career through the favored subject matter of women. Due to the long historic, academic tradition of painting the female body, women were the perfect subject matter for Picabia’s endless efforts to upend, subvert, and reinterpret modern painting. This includes masterpieces from his frenzied ‘Monster’ series, revolutionary ‘Transparencies’, and proto-Pop portraits of pin-up models and actresses with works that defies our conventional understanding of modern art.

Roots of Cool: A Celebration of Trees and Shade in a Warming World

Diana Kohne - Hyperion

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Descanso Gardens Sturt Haaga Gallery until 12 October 2025

This vibrant new indoor-outdoor exhibition spotlights the vital role trees play in climate resilience and urban livability. Curated by Edith and Jolly de Guzman, featuring over one dozen female artists who want visitors to reflect on ‘shade equity’—the idea that access to cooling shade is not distributed equally across communities.

Installations span from historical reflections on discriminatory planning policies to forward-looking, community-centered visions of cooler, greener neighborhoods blending visual art, music, and storytelling into a multi-sensory exploration, with poignant works such as Chantée Benefield, who rebuilt her piece after losing her original artwork and family home in the Eaton Fire. ‘This was a brutal reminder of why we are taking on the topic of shade equity,’ the curators noted.

Back to Earth

BackTotheEarth_InstallationView14_CourtesyoftheartistandRobertsProjects,LosAngeles,California;PhotoPaulSalveson

(Image credit: Paul Salveson)

Roberts Projects until 9 August 2025

The exhibition pulls together this unique group of artists focusing on the symbiotic relationship with their environment, fostering a deeper understanding around ineffable forces of nature and the multitude of ways that artists merge with and draw inspiration from the land. Featuring painting, drawing, sculpture and installation alongside a rotating selection of video works, highlighting how artists use organic materials, found objects and elemental forces to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the natural world. Artists include Evan Newsbit, Lenz Geerk, Luke Agada, Suchitra Mattai and Wendy Red Star, alongside new voices Aaron Glasson, Jackie Amézquita, Jackie Castillo, Koyoltzintli, Miguel Arzabe, Noah Schneiderman and Saif Azzuz.

From Los Angeles to Catalina: The Art of Sonia Romero

woman with a tattoo

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Catalina Museum for Art & History, until 12 October 2025

Sonia Romero is an acclaimed Los Angeles artist known for her iconic murals at Mariachi Plaza and MacArthur Park Station. The exhibition draws from her 2024 research residency in Avalon (on the island) and incorporates decades-old Catalina postcards, brochures, and tile motifs — reframed through her signature Chicano aesthetic and contemporary printmaking. It’s a layered, emotional project rooted in memory, identity, and place. Her work is featured in the Smithsonian, LACMA and The Cheech. This exhibition features a curated selection of Romero’s silkscreen prints, paintings and a brand-new site-specific work that captures the nostalgic charm and layered cultural history of Catalina Island.

Long Loops

Carnival 2025 by Christina Kimeze

(Image credit: Christina Kimeze)

Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood until 4 October 2025

British artist Christina Kimeze is following up her first UK solo exhibition this Spring at South London Gallery, with her first solo show in West Hollywood at Hauser & Wirth. The artists’ new paintings explore the complexity of interior spaces, both domestic and psychological. Vibrant and uniquely textured, her canvases depict ethereal interiors, landscapes and figures—either solitary or intimately connected—with an air of mystery and mutability. In some of her more recent works, Kimeze draws inspiration from the resurgence of roller skating in Black communities in the UK, seeing it as a metaphor for flight and freedom. Through her paintings, she captures the sensation of gliding through space while also reflecting on the tension of existing between two states—both grounded and soaring.

The Signs are Present

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(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

Lisson Gallery until 23 August 2025

For his first solo show in LA, Chinese-born Li Ran is presenting a new body of 9 oil-on-canvas paintings including his largest scale piece to date. These works mark a discernable evolution in Ran’s practice, wherein his focus has shifted toward the material and formal qualities of painting. Known for his cross-disciplinary approach, which spans video, performance, writing, and installation, Li often interrogates systems of ideology, cultural translation, and intellectual history. In this new body of work, he deliberately tempers the satirical and conceptual strategies that defined his earlier projects in favor of a quieter, more ambiguous visual language..

Big Art. Bigger Dreams.

DTLA Alliance

(Image credit: DTLA Alliance)

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.

Noah Davis

Noah Davis, Single Mother with Father Out of the Picture © The Estate of Noah DavisCourtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

(Image credit: Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner)

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

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(Image credit: Joshua White)

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

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(Image credit: Courtesy of gallery and artist)

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”.

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

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(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

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.

Fire Relief for Artists: A Benefit Exhibition

Closure, 1988, courtesy of Louis Stern

(Image credit: courtesy of Louis Stern)

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

Nguyen Quang Thang, Youth Never Return, 2011, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, promised gift of the Fondation INK, © Nguyen Quang Thang, photo by Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva, courtesy of the Fondation INK

(Image credit: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva, courtesy of the Fondation INK)

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

Zheng Chongbin, The Poetry of Receding Continents, 2024, courtesy of the artist, © Zheng Chongbin

(Image credit: Zheng Chongbin)

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.

Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy

Ireland-Hollyhock

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

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.

Mark Dion: Excavations

Mark Dion Excavations Los Angeles exhibition

(Image credit: Mark Dion)

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

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(Image credit: Courtesy of the gallery)

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

Patrick Martinez's Same Boat on display in Los Angeles

(Image credit: Ivan Baan)

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

Mineo Mizuno: Homage to Nature

(Image credit: The Huntingdon)

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.

Carole Dixon is a prolific lifestyle writer-editor currently based in Los Angeles. As a Wallpaper* contributor since 2004, she covers travel, architecture, art, fashion, food, design, beauty, and culture for the magazine and online, and was formerly the LA City editor for the Wallpaper* City Guides to Los Angeles.