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

Just in time for LA summer escapes, Pacific Coast Highway is back open offering easy access to The Getty Villa in Malibu - which will reopen on 27 June, for the first time since the Palisades fire earlier this year - with full access to the ancient Roman and Greek art, along with the tranquil gardens.

Other outdoor art pursuits include ‘Roots of Cool’ celebrating female artists and climate resilience at Descanso Gardens, The Great Migration sculptures at Beverly Hills Gardens, and Catalina Island showcases Chicano muralist Sonia Romero, while Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood examines the grand traditions of the Indian wedding.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in July 2025

Why Did I Say Yes?

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

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.

About Painting

Sprüth Magers until August 2, 2025

The paintings of Andreas Schulze (1955) and Salvo (1947–2015) depict intriguing worlds across vibrant landscapes and eccentric interiors, and their unique conceptual approaches to painting evolved over decades of experimentation with color, light and form - feature so prevalent in the history of modern art in Southern California, from its impressionist, plein-air roots to the reflective plastics and resins of the 1960s onward.

This exhibition of new works by Schulze, alongside paintings by Salvo, bring into focus their parallel contributions to the discourse of contemporary painting and their deft manipulation of paint to depict shifting spatial and light effects.

Sharon Ellis

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 19^th-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

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

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

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

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.

ELSEWHERE

Tappan until 2 August 2025

Following the success of Tappan’s first-ever NYC pop-up last month, the Melrose gallery is offering a group exhibition that explores the landscape not as a fixed geography, but as an emotional terrain, dreamspace, and inner world. Through painting, sculpture, and mixed media, 14 artists —including Gia Coppola and Marleigh Culver—examine how imagined and remembered places shape identity, longing, and the futures we envision. Rising voice Marina Ross, is a Chicago-based painter making her Tappan debut with her emotionally charged reinterpretations of The Wizard of Oz frame Dorothy as a lens for loss, memory, and myth, rendered in layers of oxidized teal, seafoam green, and haze. Her paintings shift between clarity and spectral abstraction, capturing grief and performance with unsettling intimacy.

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. 

The Signs are Present

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.

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

Hammer until 31 August 2025

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

Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me

The Broad until 28 September 2025

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

Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 19

Southern Guild until 6 September 2025

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

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

Prelude to the Sun

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery until 2 July 2025

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

Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies

Fahey/Klein until 5 July 2025

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

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

Josh Sperling: Big Picture

Perrotin until 3 July 2025

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

Tomoo Gokita: NAKED

BLUM Los Angeles until 2 August 2025

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

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

Skirball Cultural Center, until 31 August 2025

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

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

Fire Relief for Artists: A Benefit Exhibition

Louis Stern, West Hollywood, until Aug 16

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

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

LACMA from 6 April until 19 October 2025

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

Zheng Chongbin: Golden State

LACMA until 4 January 2026

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

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.

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema

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

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

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

academymuseum.org

Mark Dion: Excavations

LaBrea Tar Pits, until September 2025

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

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

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

tarpits.org/mark-dion-pst

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion

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

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

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

Intuit Dome

Inglewood, permanent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mineo Mizuno: Homage to Nature

The Huntington, Pasadena, until 25 May 2029

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

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