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

The non-fall September weather, which in Los Angeles equals a heatwave, brings exhibits with a verdant background from ‘Flesh of the Forest’ at Oxy Arts in Highland Park, showcasing nine contemporary artists from the African diaspora who imagine new forms of human and nonhuman interaction between empire and land. While ‘In Bloom’ at Forest Lawn in Glendale examines the time-honored floral motif in all forms from painting to sculpture and video. Most of the fall exhibits are debuting mid-month, so plenty of time to plan, including the West Hollywood Design District ArtWalk (with a nod to Fall fashion); and in Hollywood, a unique performance installation piece by Derek Fordjour, in a collaboration with Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY studio at David Kordansky; plus, Jaws: The Exhibition at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is celebrating 50 (terrifying) years of the Spielberg classic film.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in September 2025

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.

Joshua Petker

Anat Ebgi, Mid-Wiltshire, 13 September to 1 November 2025

For his third solo show with Anat Ebgi, LA-based painter Joshua Petker is debuting an entirely new body of work. Known for his vibrant, kaleidoscopic style, layering anonymous art historical references with influences such as Soviet cartoons while playfully challenging formal painting conventions. In this show, the paintings evoke stills from surrealist films, with faces dissolving into abstraction. Brighter and more whimsical, these new works expand on Petker’s ongoing exploration of memory, beauty, and transformation.

To coincide with the opening in September, Petker is also releasing his first book, featuring an essay by renowned feminist curator, Kathy Battista, and exclusive imagery from his last four shows.

Destiny

David Zwirner 13 September until 1 November 2025

For Josh Smith’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles, the artist has made a series of paintings that continue his long-running dialogue with the grim reaper, a reoccurring figure that has appeared in his work for years. In these new works, the reaper is set loose in New York City, riding a bicycle through familiar streets, cutting past landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The once faceless symbol of death now has eyes and stares back at you, tangled in the unsettling and alive swirl of the city.

In Bloom: Flowers in Contemporary Art

Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, 20 September 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.

SCHISM

Patricia Sweetow Gallery, DTLA, 13 September, until 18 October

Following the successful 2024-2025 solo exhibition of HOUSE OF at Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles, Ramekon O’Arwisters’ first one-person exhibition, SCHISM, is an acknowledgement of chaotic shifts and swings in predictability and safety in politics and community. Targeting, overreach, and coded responses are not new to Black Americans; finding ways to navigate being Black and Queer between the hazards is the theme of this upcoming exhibition, a watery ground of coded abstraction. On view in the exhibition will be the artists’ iconic sculpture, Black on Black; tapestries from the Bound in Black series; a series of black and white self-portraits; and new textile sculptures.

Les soñadores

REDCAT, DTLA, 13 September to 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.

ArtWalk: Fall Fashion Edition

West Hollywood Design District, 20 September 2025

For the annual West Hollywood Design District all-day-long ArtWalk, with 30 businesses participating, including many of the top fashion houses as a nod to the Fall season. The bulk of the activities will kick off with a 3-5pm opening at Leica Gallery in a collaboration with Petrossian, and photographers Karen Ballard and Mona Kuhn on hand for their exhibitions, followed by Louis Stern who is sharing a sneak peek of their Karl Benjamin Centennial retrospective, which will open 27 Sept, and M+B is opening with visual artist Kristof Shanty. Open houses will flow all day at art galleries from Phillips, Hamilton Selway, Loisir, and Art Angels, with Fall collections and sneak peeks for Winter from Maxfield to John Varvatos and Wolf & Badger.

Nights of Cabiria

Gagosian, Beverly Hills, 25 September until 1 November 2025

This new sculpture series by Carol Bove, and her first full Beverly Hills exhibition, transforms the gallery's unique architecture by turning reclaimed structural scaffolding—'soldier beams’ originally intended for civil engineering—into playful sculptural follies and pedestals. Bove's latest works directly engage with Los Angeles' Cold War-era industrial heritage, drawing inspiration from the city's aerospace manufacturing and subcultural expressions like precision surfboard production. The sculptures blend raw, weathered surfaces with mirror-polished elements, as seen in Parallel Friction (2025), where crumpled steel tubing painted vibrant orange sits atop weathered girders.

Manoucher Yektai

Karma, 19 September to 1 November

Iranian-born poet and painter Manoucher Yektai is presenting a survey of early paintings organized by curator and writer Negar Azimi, 'Beginnings'. Focusing on the first decades of Yektai’s career, the exhibition offers access to the artist’s early experimentation with genre, color, shape, and form—foundational elements that illuminate the development of his mature practice. In the 1940s, Yektai left Tehran to study in Paris with André Lhote before relocating to New York, where he became part of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists and developed close ties with artists such as de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock These early paintings, most of which have never been exhibited before, manage to complicate hitherto entrenched narratives around both AbEx and Yektai’s artistic trajectories at large.

Annie Lapin

Nazarian/Curcio, 13 September until 25 October 2025

The devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires last winter led LA-artist Annie Lapin to reconsider landscape painting and the way she responds to it in her practice. Focusing more specifically on her own experience of the California landscape, these paintings mark several shifts in this new body of work. Previously engaged with unraveling Romantic depictions of landscape, for this exhibition Lapin leans into a new language that draws on contemporary web-sourced photographs of her home state and harnesses collage and abstraction to make compositional choices that echo Transcendentalist landscape painting pre-WW2. The style that emerges retains the digital fragmentation of her previous works and flashes of a wide variety of art historical allusions, but aims at transmitting something more personal for Lapin about our encounters with landscape and the way we hold nature in our mind now.

Danielle Orchard

Perrotin until 12 September to 18 October 2025

American artist Danielle Orchard is known for her luminous, stylized paintings of female figures that draw from the language of analytic Cubism and modernist art. Working from her studio in Massachusetts, Orchard explores the complexities of the female experience through fragmented forms, intimate gestures, and richly layered compositions. Her paintings challenge traditional portrayals of women in art history, offering a perspective shaped by her own life as both a woman and a mother.

For her upcoming solo exhibition at Perrotin Los Angeles, Orchard presents a new body of work centered on the depictions of motherhood. These paintings continue her dialogue on the female nude—not as an object of observation, but as an active subject of narrative, memory, and interiority. With a refined yet expressive approach to color and form, Orchard creates spaces where the psychological and painterly realms merge, offering nuanced portraits of intimacy, exhaustion, quiet resilience, and transformation.

Nightsong

David Kordansky Gallery, 13 September to 11 October 2025

New York–based multidisciplinary artist, Derek Fordjour, will debut his second major solo show at David Kordansky Gallery. Drawing from Black sonic traditions–gospel, blues, jazz, and spirituals Nightsong will delve into a layered, immersive installation that fuses painting, sculpture, performance, architecture, and sound into a singular experiential environment. The show will be open exclusively during evening hours, with timed performances.

Upon entering, visitors will encounter a hush harbor-inspired passageway thick with trees, concealed viewing chambers and a raised performance platform inhabited by a live ensemble of singers – the environment was conceived in collaboration with Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of the award-winning design studio WHY, most recently recognized for their work with the MET and The Louvre.

Jaws: The Exhibition

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 13 September 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.

Srklet

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.

Garden of Eve

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.

Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy

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

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.

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

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.

From Los Angeles to Catalina: The Art of Sonia Romero

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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

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.