Xela Institute of Art is proud to present the debut solo museum exhibition by Dominican-American artist Nara Nicole Winston Betancourt. Rooted in ancestral memory, matrilineal craft, and the spiritual resonance of land, Morir Soñando – To Die Dreaming is an intimate exploration of honoring land and familial legacy.

Named after the beloved Dominican beverage, morir soñando translates to “to die dreaming.” Revealed in material poetics, the entrance of the exhibition presents two stained glass works inviting viewers into Winston’s Matriarcha: a lived and inherited matrilineage owing through craft, memory, and sacred indigenous stones. Winston draws directly from her mother’s stained glass artistic practice influencing the glass works on view. They serve not only as material artifacts of love and lineage, but as emotional conduits for Winston’s deeper inquiry into how culture is layered across history, memory, and enduring influence of family on the identity. 

“This project began as an exploration of land as a visual subject, but as I delved deeper, the land became a source or a living archive from which part of our family story emerges and plays out.”

Beyond the stained glass are a series of paintings of where Winston’s mother’s family is from–a rural countryside village called Sabana Larga, located on the outskirts of Baní in the Dominican Republic. In these, Winston animates the soil, stones, and stories of her grandfather’s homeland. But the paintings do not remain rooted there–they migrate to Baní, where her mother is from and was raised, and to the U.S., where her grandmother and much of the family settled beginning in the 1990s. Fragmentation and collage define her approach with visceral motifs expressed in raw flesh and meat–symbols of life and death. The paintings reside hidden, within an openable cupboard installation offering viewers a subversion of colonial traditions of the curiosity cabinet towards the subject of live, intimate inheritance. 

With reverence and resistance, Morir Soñando – To Die Dreaming weaves a fabric of land and heritage, the Caribbean diaspora, and the invisible threads that bind us.

For press inquiries, images, or to schedule a viewing, please contact info@xela.art.  

About the Artist

Nara Nicole Winston Betancourt is a Dominican-American multidisciplinary artist (1998) currently based in Los Angeles. As a child, she was raised in countries throughout Latin America and Asia until 2010, when she returned to her mother’s native country, the Dominican Republic. After graduating from the Chavon School of Design in the Dominican Republic (2018), she transferred to the Netherlands and finished her Bachelors in Fine Arts from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

About Xela Institute of Art
Xela Institute of Art is a nonprofit art exhibition space located in Wrigley Village, Long Beach/Los Angeles County, dedicated to supporting the careers of emerging, mid-career, and senior artists.

Our physical address is:
2176 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90806

Please book a free public visit through our Calendly to schedule at least one-week in advance. We are open to the public by appointment only to accommodate staffing.

The Xela Institute of Art welcomes all education levels to explore and learn about the exhibitions on view.

Nara Nicole Winston Betancourt: Morir Soñando - To Die Dreaming

Xela Institute of Art

Perrotin Los Angeles is delighted to present a new solo exhibition by Mark Ryden titled 'Eye Am.' Composed of twelve paintings and a selection of drawings, 'Eye Am' debuts a succinct, eccentric series of mise-en-scènes that resist explanation. Ryden’s worlds, perhaps only a rabbit hole away from our own, run on a separate logic. A wide-eyed Bye-lo Baby, a Tibetan snow lion, an Abe Lincoln chaperon, and, more mirage than flesh, a thin Christ pouring wine for a circle of young girls from his own dripping veins. Sentient, wondrous, and nonsensical entities inhabit the works.

One tubular figure, a yam perhaps, lies in bed at night, keeping vigil; the sheets retain a quality of Philippe de Champaigne’s 'Ex-Voto' (1662), a painting of the artist's paralyzed daughter miraculously healed in a convent. With the ornate frame inseparable from the body of the canvas, Ryden’s figure stares with a single eye at the exhibition’s title written above, as if aware of its own summoning. 'Eye Am': the words emboss and disguise a yam in plain sight. In a later work, a yam floats upright over a dreamscape. The sedentary self and, later, the higher self. The yam is a curious medium, echoing the fetuses and internal organs that recur across Ryden’s work. The medium signals fertility, or perhaps commodity—“medium yams, 25 cents a pound”—or even a continued exploration of the partition between body and spirit. Much is formed in darkness, down in a certain country of dreams. In soil. In the womb. In sleep. In scripture, before there was light. Take the pineal gland. Detectable at three weeks, it is the first gland formed in the fetus; later, this tiny pinecone-shaped organ releases melatonin in darkness, telling the body to sleep. It is the only part of the brain without a pair. Descartes called it the “seat of the soul,” and in Yogic teachings it aligns with the Ajna chakra, “the third eye.”

The seat of the soul. The rice-sized force field they can’t breach.

In Ryden’s 177th painting, 'The Sentinel' (2024), a single eye looks out from a mysterious object onto a field now covered with wild flowers. A bee, curious by the hush of her tiny, febrile moan, looks back. The title itself trips. It trips, another small synchronicity: only after naming the work did Ryden learn that 'The Sentinel' (1951) by Arthur C. Clarke was the story that inspired the film '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) and much science fiction since. Where did this watchtower come from, before the lake fell still and the third eye opened on this strange world? Better not answer. Not that I know. Best not spoil the illusion.

—Paige Haran

Well, maybe one spoiler. The caterpillar is Timothy Leary. If you can find him, he’s ready to
ask the riddle of life: “Who are you?”

Doors to Eye Am open on October 30 at 5:00 p.m.

A book signing with Mark Ryden will be held on October 31, from 1:00-3:00 p.m.

Mark Ryden: Eye Am

Perrotin

Night Gallery is thrilled to present In Circles, Still Forward, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Kayla Witt. In Circles, Still Forward is Witt’s first solo exhibition with the gallery following her inclusion in Superbloom and our 2024 Frieze London presentation.

Witt’s work befriends the unknown and the varied ways in which we approach the mysteries that surround us. Spanning ancient archetypes and new age mysticism, Witt maps our yearning for connectivity, understanding and self actualization.

There is an earnest hunger in Witt’s latest body of work. A hunger for guidance, for belonging, for clarity and healing. Access to immaterial realms offered by posters and billboards highlight the ubiquity of ancient questions, commercialized in tchotchke form. Signage, symbols and talismans overlap and reinforce their common message by illustrating the persistence of invitations to step toward unchartered waters.

Like the snake that eats its tail, Witt employs the circle as a cyclical emblem, perpetually moving through beginnings and endings. The circle is contained and endless, centripetal and holistic, composed of continuous points to make a whole. Geometry carries sacred and utilitarian weight in Witt’s lexicon.

The paintings in the exhibition function as portraiture, depicting states of mind both singular and collective. As Witt reminds us, interiority is a physical and psychological space. In Searching for the Missing Piece, Witt selects items that act as surrogates for lived experience. Our belongings depict our longings, microcosms of desire fixed in objecthood. A model skeleton with arms extended reaches for a cosmic orb on a staircase that leads to nowhere. Facets of life vast enough to spark existential dread are rendered comprehendible in miniaturization. The immensity of the universe affixed in pacified neutrality when found repeated in wallpaper motifs, wind chimes and window appliqués. These shifts in scale enlarge our sense of self, enabling fleeting reprieve from panic stricken insignificance amongst planetary rhythms. An unassuming diptych, the work’s lost piece of the puzzle remains afloat, ever searching for home.

Signifiers of transformation appear throughout In Circles, Still Forward. Heralds of regeneration abound, a new leaf around every corner if you wish it. Tolled numbers offering salvation line each pathway, tempting us with a fresh start. Signs ask viewers to “Follow Signs”, river stones are engraved with reminders to “Adjust”, caterpillars climb blades of grass while chicks break out of their shells.

Psychic storefronts and other constructed vessels for transcendence are juxtaposed with awe inspiring sky scapes, infusing the work with temporality. Seemingly synchronistic encounters with the sublime draw upon Carl Jung’s notion of the numinous. The numinous is experiential, a spiritual presence in space that can free us from isolation, reconnecting us with the world at large.

With lighthearted sincerity In Circles, Still Forward pulls at the strings of what it means to live in both a spiritual and material world. As the Greek goddess Hecate adorns a roadside divorce attorney, the semiotics of landscape reflect our collective psyche.

-Mickey Mackenna Dill

Kayla Witt (b. 1994, Calgary, AB, Canada) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA; and the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Waterloo, ON. She has participated in group shows at Arsenal Contemporary, New York; albertz benda, Los Angeles, CA; Ketabi Bourdet, Paris, FR; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong; Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Toronto, ON; among others. Witt has completed a number of residencies including Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; and Struts Gallery, Sackville, NB. Her work has been featured in HypeArt, Booooooom, Harper’s Magazine, It’s Nice That, Surface Mag, among others. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, ON and her MFA from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON. Witt lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Kayla Witt: In Circles, Still Forward

Night Gallery South

Nonaka-Hill Los Angeles announces our Fall group exhibition, Tokonoma Workshop, on view from November 18 - December 20, 2025 with an opening reception on Satruday November 22, 2025, 6-8 pm.

Tokonoma Workshop reinterprets the traditional Japanese, raised, shallow alcove space used to display art objects such as hanging scrolls (掛け軸 kakejiku), ikebana flower arrangements, incense burners, or fine art ceramics. The exhibition aims to explore the peculiar phenomenon of this architectural trope which incorporates a seasonal curatorial practice into “good homes” as part of Japanese family life.

Tokonoma Workshop is a chance to show off unexpected pairings by artists from our program with works by artists based in Los Angeles and beyond. In the gallery, 2D work and 3D works come together with seasonal, natural elements and ikebana arrangements made by Kyoko Oshiro. Not all domestic tokonomas are havens of neat arrangements, we’ve seen chaotic tokonoma in Japanese homes. You could interpret those tokonoma as our insane junk drawers - a place that ends up with pile ups of works, old magazines, vintage TVs not working or dead plants. There will be a variety of tonokoma spaces at Nonaka-Hill on exhibit, as the weeks pass, the gallery team will update and shift elements, subtracting and adding works. Initially elegant arrangements may naturally arrive at disarray - just like at any “good home.”

Participating artists:
Saori (Madokoro) Akutagawa, Adam Alessi, Rando Aso, Peter Doig, Koichi Enomoto, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Siobhan Furnary, Sawako Goda, Satoru Hoshino, Tatsuo Ikeda, Ulala Imai, Imaemon Imaizumi XIII, Kentaro Kawabata, Shio Kusaka, Calvin Marcus, Thomas McDonell, Nicolas G. Miller, Jiro Nagase, Nakahara Nantenbō, Keyikō Nishimura III, Kaz Oshiro, Silke Otto Knapp, Carol Rama, Kiyomizu Kyubey | Rokubey VII, Kiyomizu Rokubey VIII, Sterling Ruby, Tatsuzo Shimaoka, Kenzi Shiokava, Takuro Tamayama, Sofu Teshigahara, Masaomi Yasunaga


Tokonoma Workshop

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

a collaboration with shapiro joyal studio

Shonto Begay
Cirilo Domine
Sophia Flood
Susan Hertel
Leo Krikorian 
NEAL
Taidgh O’ Neill
Daniel Pontius 
Fritz Scholder
Benjamin L. Turner
Norman Zammitt

A Quiet Room 

Babst Gallery 

AMPHI Gallery is pleased to present "A Boat Made of Dreams", an exhibition curated by Robert Wilhite that brings together the work of three Los Angeles artists: Scott Grieger, Margaret Nielsen, and Axel Wilhite. Their works explore the terrain of the subconscious, that shifting border between dream and waking life. Each artist attempts to capture those fleeting, powerful moments when imagination and emotion overlap, when the familiar becomes strange and the unexpected presents itself on a mystical level.

During the mid-1980s, Scott Grieger, painter, educator, and longtime chairman of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design, created a series of small, intimate, and mystical portraits of his East Melrose Avenue neighbors: punk musicians, drug addicts, and street people he befriended and gained the trust of. These faces, detached from their bodies and surrounded by fields of color, float like dream fragments. Grieger described them as “the masks that the individuals wore and hid behind,” allowing them to become who they imagined themselves to be. His paintings reveal both the confidence and the insecurity of his young subjects, at once real and unreal, awake and dreaming.

Margaret Nielsen, a Los Angeles painter born in Edmonton, Canada, and trained at the Chouinard Institute in the 1970s, has long blurred the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Exhibiting with the Asher Faure Gallery and later at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Nielsen’s work plays with transformation: waterfalls spill from one picture into another, canoes drift in midair, and a snake hovers above. As Thomas W. Rhoads, executive director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, observed, “Nielsen employs a variety of iconographic and stylistic means to confound the relationship between image and object, fantasy and reality, nature and culture.” Her paintings, reminiscent of both René Magritte and Albert Bierstadt, open a private realm where elemental forces—fire, water, earth, and air—become sources of mystery, humor, and revelation.

The third artist in "A Boat Made of Dreams" is Axel Wilhite, whose imagery comes directly from his dreams. He wakes in the night to record them—notes, sketches, flashes of color, and shapes—and later transforms these fragments into visual reflections that capture both the story and the mood of the dream. Wilhite approaches his dreams with sincerity and insight, believing that these nocturnal visions hold truths about the psyche that waking logic cannot express. In addition to his studio work, Wilhite is the publisher of the online arts publication 7x7.LA and was curator and co-director of the now-defunct Space Ten Gallery in Hawthorne, California.

Together, Grieger, Nielsen, and Wilhite offer entry into parallel realms, spaces where the conscious and unconscious meet. "A Boat Made of Dreams" invites viewers to move through these interior landscapes, to encounter the masks, symbols, and sensations that live just beneath the surface of thought.

Image: Axel Wilhite, “Ayahuasca: The first night, nothing. The second night, I am ushered into some kind of procession, a parade...”, 2021, Graphite on watercolor paper.

A Boat Made of Dreams

AMPHI gallery

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Being Home, an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Gunderman. 

With this exhibition, Gunderman explores the deep, often unseen mechanisms of the natural world through large - scale, vividly hued canvases that transform overlooked moments - an owl’s eye, a sprouting seed, a horizon line - into profound meditations on life, time, and transformation. Using rich, contrasting colors and recurring circular motifs, Gunderman dissolves traditional distinctions between landscape, symbol, and diagram, inviting viewers into an immersive visual language where boundaries are always in flux.

Gunderman’s approach to painting is one of close observation and poetic inquiry. Drawing from his encounters with the land—whether a bear crossing his property or the barely perceptible shift of a horizon - he avoids the grand or dramatic in favor of the nascent and emergent. In works like Seed (2025), the entire life cycle is compressed into a single form, capturing a moment of becoming that is both microscopic and immense. Each piece begins with a word, not as a title but as a generative root, unfolding into visual meditations on growth, perception, and the quiet complexity of ecological life. The color fields bleed into one another - yellows into blues and greys, purples into oranges, creams, and blacks - echoing the slow, organic spread of life across a landscape.

Hovering between abstraction and representation, Gunderman’s paintings evoke the tone of scientific diagrams or symbolic maps rather than literal depictions. Circular forms recur as stand-ins for planets, particles, and units of time. In Owl (2025), the bird's oversized yellow eye dominates the composition, its pupil, drawn from a background wash of midnight blue, reflects an uncanny convergence of inner vision and cosmic awareness. While in Sprout (2025), two overlapping circles swirl with jewel tones, partially framed by red lines that act as both horizon and threshold. The work evokes the origin point of life, with echoes of the same colors appearing both above and below the horizon - suggesting a mirrored continuity between earth and sky, inner and outer, seed and bloom. 

Within Being Home, Gunderman continues his long-standing engagement with land, labor, and the systems that bind them. The exhibition’s title speaks to this rootedness - not in a fixed sense of place, but in an ongoing dialogue between environment and imagination. Through rich color palettes and quietly transformative imagery, the works offer a meditation on how life begins, how it evolves, and how attention to the smallest details can reveal the most profound truths. In doing so, Gunderman extends an invitation: to see more deeply, to feel more fully, and to dwell - however briefly - in moments of wonder.

This is Robert Gunderman's second solo exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery.

Robert Gunderman (USA, b. 1963) Recent solo exhibitions include Place Like You, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Quiet Beliefs, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; This End, AF Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Mollusk Half-Sisters, Rude Drawing, Los Angeles, CA, and Never Let Us Go, Desert Center, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Surface Streets, curated by Russel Ferguson, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Ripe, Harper’s, Los Angeles, 2 Person Show with Tracy Grayson, BravinLee Programs, New York, NY; LA ON FIRE curated by Michael Slenske, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and Between Worlds, Edward Cella, Los Angeles, CA. In 1992, he co-founded FOOD HOUSE, an alternative art space in Santa Monica, followed by ACME, an influential artist-run space that opened in 1994. Robert Gunderman lives and works near Fillmore, CA, in the Santa Clara River Valley just north of Los Angeles.



Robert Gunderman: Being Home

Wilding Cran Gallery

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present 'Who’s Laughing Now?', a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Michela Griffo. 

A prominent activist in the LGBT civil rights movement since the 1960s, Griffo has dedicated her life and artmaking to the cause of incisive protest and sociopolitical critique. In 'Who’s Laughing Now?', the artist presents a series of allegories that take the form of diptychs. Pairing vivid oil paintings of iconic Disney characters with delicately rendered graphite drawings of human experiences—then linking the two with comic strip-style commentary that destabilizes ideas of both—Griffo advocates for the reconsideration of pervasive cultural standards around gay rights, women’s rights, fair wages, and much more.

___

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present 'Friends, Acquaintances, and Idols', a solo exhibition by the late Los Angeles-based artist Kenneth Kendall.

Delectably camp, Kendall’s practice presciently embraced both post-modernism’s penchant for vernacular pastiche and pop art’s analysis of fame before either concept entered the mainstream. Employing the tradition of enamel portrait miniatures—popularized in 1630s Europe—to depict his many friends, acquaintances, and idols such as Vivian Zarvis and Mae West, Kendall’s work was unapologetically exuberant. During the 1950s and 60s, when the Ferus Gallery’s hypermasculinity dominated the Los Angeles art world, Kendall operated as an insider-outsider—a covertly queer artist that preferred a dazzling milieu of Hollywood starlets.

Excerpts of exhibition texts by Christie Hayden

Michela Griffo: Who's Laughing Now? | Kenneth Kendall: Friends, Acquaintances, and Idols

Moskowitz Bayse

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present Stills, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Yunhee Min, on view from November 1st through December 20th, 2025.

Yunhee Min’s new suite of small-scale paintings reflects her ongoing interest in optical phenomena, transient light, and in capturing a sense of emergence. Each piece meditates on the passage of time, translating atmospheric impressions, sounds, memories, and observations into heavily saturated, tonal and near-translucent fields of color. Through Min’s deft grasp of the interactions between color, form, and opacity, the compositions seem to vibrate and flicker as layers of paint meander in and out of visibility. 

Min likens this work both to film stills and to still life painting. These two genres possess the seemingly contradictory qualities of being static while alluding to what may have preceded and what may come. She describes a process that involves “prolonged looking, quick glances…sounds near and distant, ambulating, floating, and remembering”, expressed through palimpsests of color and gesture that alternatingly emerge and disappear.

Min continues an exploration of the material possibilities of mark-making, employing a variety of different applications: wet and dry brush strokes, pours, drips, and rolls. The amalgamation of these approaches creates complex relationships between figure and ground, where solids dissolve into formlessness and shapes materialize out of pure expanses. 

On this new body of work Min writes: 

Like still images from a film, these paintings hold time with numerous segments and events on the surface of the canvas. When I think about still life painting, I imagine stillness in time, presence, and passing of light. 

Always present in everything visible, color is living and moving. 

Yunhee Min (b. Seoul, Korea) is a Los Angeles-based artist who holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MA in Design Studies from Harvard University. Recent site-specific installations and architectural interventions include: Hammer Projects: Yunhee Min, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Yunhee Min & Peter Tolkin: Red Carpet in C, University of California, Riverside, Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside, CA; Equitable Vitrines, Equitable Life Building, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

Min has had solo exhibitions at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; ArtPace, San Antonio, TX; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Exercise, Vancouver, BC. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). In 2022 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Upcoming projects include a permanent mosaic installation in the new Westwood/UCLA Los Angeles Metro station (scheduled to open 2028); as well as a site-specific installation for the opening of the new Memphis Art Museum (scheduled to open 2026). 

Min has shown with Vielmetter Los Angeles since 2003 and is also represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York.

The gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 freeway. Parking is available in the north and south parking lots adjacent to the building. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and by appointment. For further information and press inquiries, please contact Olivia Gauthier at Olivia@vielmetter.com.

Image: Yunhee Min, “Still (#18),” 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20" [HxW], Photo credit: Brica Wilcox

Yunhee Min: Stills

Vielmetter Los Angeles

KP PROJECTS is pleased to announce a new exhibition of charcoal drawings by Eric Nash.

West of Heaven, is a series of photorealistic charcoals that capture the subtle, surreal, and subliminal allure of California culture. Nash’s signature visual vocabulary references the atmosphere and minimalism of the Light and Space Movement (originating in Southern California in the 1960’s), crafting an enticing drama that is born from the contrast between light and dark, the divine and the material. 

“West of the wealth, the action, prestige and glamour are lonely places that are overlooked or ignored. No roads paved in gold here but rather pawn shops that buy gold. It’s quietly beautiful. Simple desires, yearning, lust, and dreams transcend harsh realities. Small moments of truth are documented. This is where I live and what I draw in charcoal, the most elemental, ancient and dramatic of mediums. Here is the contrast of life and light in the shadows West of Heaven.” – Eric Nash

Nash’s creative process is ritualistic, a sacramental quality where the act of observing is felt. Each image originates as a photograph shot by the artist, which is then meticulously drawn in charcoal on thick, smooth, 33 x 44 inch sheets 120lb Stonehenge paper. Here, the mundane is celebrated and imbued with reverence.

“At a very young age, learned to see beauty and soul in the mundane. Years later my journey drew me to the California desert where I now live - a vast expanse of desire and dreams. I feel at home. These drawings are visual poems to these feelings and places, the reason I am an artist.” – Eric Nash

West of Heaven will be on view from November 22nd – December 27, 2025. Gallery Hours are Tuesday - Saturday, 12pm - 6pm.

Eric Nash: West of Heaven

KP Projects

Opening Reception 5 pm - 7 pm

DON’T LOOK Projects is pleased to present Ahí viene el Coco—an exhibition that invokes the metaphorical boogeyman, to critically examine the systemic violence of contemporary global polarization and the resulting monocultural, beige aesthetic of manufactured consensus. The exhibition asserts that the current retreat from inclusivity to apartheid is a psychological defense mechanism against the visible failure of prevailing economic models, which has led to the shattering of the meritocratic illusion.

Libertad Alcántara: Ahí viene el Coco / Here Comes the Boogeyman

DON’T LOOK Projects

AR OPEN
Augmented Reality Exhibition feat. "Diddle My Skittle" (LA) by German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Venice Public Art Walls, Venice, CA
Free admission

AR Open invites you to immerse yourself in the world of augmented reality artworks blending into the scenic views of Venice Beach – all with your own cell phone. AR OPEN features artworks by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jeewi Lee, Pixelated Realities, Dennis Rudolph, Benedikt Terwiel, Jonas Wendelin, and others.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the piece DIDDLE MY SKITTLE (LA), commissioned by the Goethe-Institut. This AR sculpture delves into themes of gender, power, and alternative world orders, transporting the world-famous Hollywood sign to Venice Beach. It serves as the backdrop for this unique, interactive, site-specific art experience. Jordan's work confronts traditional male dominance, featuring a flying manta ray-like creature that symbolizes female empowerment and resistance against patriarchal structures. Initially inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the piece has evolved to address broader issues of gender inequity and the male gaze in cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Hollywood, and beyond.

FOR DETAILED INFO, PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND A TUTORIAL HOW TO VIEW THE AR OPEN PLEASE VISIT: https://bit.ly/ARopenLA

PLEASE NOTE: 
The site-specific installation is only accesible on location at the Venice Public Art Walls
This is a web-based project viewed via AR-enabled smartphone or tablet (2017 or newer) using mobile data.

Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.

No apps are needed to access the installation.
Upon arrival at the Venice Public Art Walls, open www.ar-open.com on your compatible smartphone or tablet.

The map and the works and further instructions on how to view all installations can only be found on the mobile version of the project: www.ar-open.com

All artworks are part of Augmented Studies, an AR program exploring the potential of augmented reality for contemporary art. Based in Berlin and operating internationally, Augmented Studies has produced numerous public art projects and has been running the exhibition series AR OPEN in Al-Zawraa Park in Baghdad since 2021 and in Berlin's Tiergarten since 2022. 


AR OPEN LA

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

Augmented Reality Exhibition
AR OPEN
Sun, 02/25/2024 -Wed, 12/31/2025
Venice Public Art Walls

Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Diddle My Skittle (LA), 2024, AR Installation, Venice Beach
feat. Diddle My Skittle (LA) by German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan

AR Open invites you to immerse yourself in the world of augmented reality artworks blending into the scenic views of Venice Beach – all with your own cell phone. AR OPEN features artworks by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jeewi Lee, Pixelated Realities, Dennis Rudolph, Benedikt Terwiel, Jonas Wendelin, and others.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the piece DIDDLE MY SKITTLE (LA), commissioned by the Goethe-Institut LA. This AR sculpture delves into themes of gender, power, and alternative world orders, transporting the world-famous Hollywood sign to Venice Beach. It serves as the backdrop for this unique, interactive, site-specific art experience. Jordan's work confronts traditional male dominance, featuring a flying manta ray-like creature that symbolizes female empowerment and resistance against patriarchal structures. Initially inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the piece has evolved to address broader issues of gender inequity and the male gaze in cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Hollywood, and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE: 
The site-specific installation is only accesible on location at the Venice Public Art Walls
This is a web-based project viewed via AR-enabled smartphone or tablet (2017 or newer) using mobile data.
Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.
No apps are needed to access the installation.
Upon arrival at the Venice Public Art Walls, open www.ar-open.com on your compatible smartphone or tablet
The map and the works and further instructions on how to view all installations can only be found on the mobile version of the project: www.ar-open.com

All artworks are part of Augmented Studies, an AR program exploring the potential of augmented reality for contemporary art. Based in Berlin and operating internationally, Augmented Studies has produced numerous public art projects and has been running the exhibition series AR OPEN in Al-Zawraa Park in Baghdad since 2021 and in Berlin's Tiergarten since 2022. 

AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

She Who Holds the Sun is a tribute to the creative process that came after the 2025 Eaton Fire which destroyed an entire exhibition of Pomonis's paintings, over a half decade of work destroyed overnight a burst of potential born from the ashes of lost work. Each painting in the exhibition takes a burned painting as its starting point, evolving in form and color into a transformational composition that both holds its antecedent close and lovingly lets it go. 

_______

The exhibition opens in conjunction with Mary Anna Pomonis's solo show She Who Holds the Sun at Charlie James Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions form an interrelated dialogue about loss, renewal, and lineage, rooted in Pomonis’s personal experience of the 2025 Eaton Fire, which destroyed an entire body of her paintings. She Who Made Me serves as the conceptual and emotional foundation for this process of recovery. The exhibition brings together artists who have profoundly shaped Pomonis’s artistic practice, including teachers, peers, and collaborators whose work embodies the matrilineal networks of influence and mentorship that sustain creative life..


Mary Anna Pomonis: She Who Holds the Sun | She Who Made Me - Curated by Mary Anna Pomonis

Charlie James Gallery

A performance with custom built sets and live performers on Saturday 13th December from 6-8pm. The sets will remain in place thru the holidays and be open for viewing during gallery hours on Friday 2nd January and Saturday 3rd January. 

The Time Off Their Life, a new performance by Holly Harrell and Bryan Morello, begins with a mourning figure, a rocking chair made from memory, and an incomplete snowman on a mobile stage. A ghost story told through multiple accounts, by multiple ambassadors of grief, shifting perceptions of the truth until reality dissipates. Moving through a dreamlike sequence of introductions, possessions and reenactments, their stories unfold through a shifting tableaux of domestic hauntings and collapsing memory. Blurring the lines between performer and spectator, actuality and apparition, until all are gathered at Christmas dinner to discuss what just happened, as if waking from the same dream. 

Performance: 'The Time Off Their Lives' by Holly Harrell and Bryan Morello

Charlotte Call Gallery

Presented in collaboration with Munzón Gallery and as part of the 2025 SUR:biennial, Crossings brings together artists navigating their American identities while honoring ancestral roots. Featuring Los Angeles-based artists of Latin American descent alongside voices from AANHPI, Middle Eastern, and immigrant communities, the exhibition offers a compelling reflection on cultural preservation, adaptation, and belonging.

Photo Credit: Hely Omar González, Abuelita en Paraíso (2023), oil, acrylic, dye on canvas, 43 x 57 x 3 in.

Crossings

Brand Library & Art Center

Touching Grass to open at North Loop West, November 21, 2025. The exhibition features four contemporary artists whose work considers human relationships with non-human life. Exhibition will run from November 21, 2025 – January 3, 2026, and an opening reception will be held at the gallery on November 21 from 6-9pm.

North Loop West is delighted to present Touching Grass, an exhibition featuring four artists who explore human relationships with the natural world, opening November 21. In sculpture by Cameron Cameron, ceramics by Ryan Flores, paintings on silk by Benedict Scheuer, and wax pastel drawings by Pallavi Sen, nature emerges as teacher, metaphor, and source of personal and cultural meaning. Through distinct approaches, these artists conjure the natural world as a dynamic ground for relation and knowledge—one that invites acts of attention, creativity, and care.

Los Angeles-based ceramicist Ryan Flores translates flora encountered on his walks through the city into intricately detailed ceramic forms. Raised in Southern California, Flores draws on plants and produce that carry both personal and cultural significance—fruits and vegetables found at vendor stands that dot the city’s sidewalks, or cacti discovered on different hiking trails. His works conjure a simultaneous sense of abundance and decay: much of the plant life depicted are mottled with wilting and rot. Evoking the vanitas tradition of painting made famous by the 17th- century Dutch Golden Age, Flores uses these visual signs of perishing as metaphor for the impermanence of each living thing.

In new drawings, Pallavi Sen examines ecology—the interconnectedness of living things—via her gardening practice. The garden for Sen is an aesthetic pursuit, a site of care, and a space where relationships between nature and culture unfold. Living and teaching at Williams College in the Berkshires of northwestern Massachusetts, the artist cultivates meadows and gardens featuring plants that also thrive in her native Bombay, recalling the flora her mother once tended on their apartment terraces. Sen’s drawings depict moments from her most recent garden on campus— the viewer gets a glimpse into a dream-like night scene of corn stalks, the back of a woman’s patterned jacket enveloped by verdancy, as the artist conjures a sense of softness and human care necessary to build and care for a garden.

Columbus, OH-based Benedict Scheuer also takes up the site of the garden in their paintings on silk. Scheuer’s works are in active dialogue with living material: if weather permits, the artist paints outside, next to the garden they tend at their home studio. The two paintings on view, Flower and Summer, are an exploration of natural patterns witnessed in plants seen in their garden. Using a new technique of painting and dyeing, the flow of color seen in Summer evokes an organic process, where time and gravity allows drips and dye bleeds that ultimately dictate the final composition. Considering the patterns in their silk works as visual scores of their own breath, Scheuer mirrors their natural rhythms of breathing through brushwork—each stroke of pigment is tied to an inhale and an exhale. As the artist undergoes their own gender transition, the garden becomes teacher—a living metaphor for constant flux and transformation, and a source of creativity and wisdom where multispecies entanglements flourish.

Sculptor Cameron Cameron works with discarded materials from her studio and the streets of Los Angeles, reclaiming and remaking them with a slowness and care rarely given to such remnants. The arms of Cameron’s chandelier, on view in Touching Grass—created from a found object gifted by a friend—have been transformed into branch-like forms. Their thorn-covered surfaces are coated in a vivid blue enamel, achieved through layers of car paint, and host tiny metal ants that the artist meticulously sculpts by hand. Cameron refers to these small creatures as “my delicates…non-domesticated creatures whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic table, hornets in the corner of the porch,” positioning them as agents that complicate boundaries between the domestic and the wild, the human and the nonhuman. Clocks like Windmill are composed of reshaped studio scraps of foam via a meditative process of molding and sanding. Their sky-blue, cloud-like resin surfaces evoke the atmosphere itself, grounding Cameron’s practice within a shared material and ecological context.

Across all four practices, nature is explored not as an abstract or distant ideal, but as a site of everyday mutualism and multi-species cohabitation. Touching Grass will be on view at 508 Chung King Road through January 3. Please join us for an opening reception on November 21 from 6- 9pm! For an exhibition preview or more information, please contact izzy@northloop.art.

ABOUT NORTH LOOP WEST
North Loop West is the LA-based outgrowth of a seasonal gallery project based in Williamstown, Mass. The gallery program fosters conversation between artists working in the LA area and those in the Northeast and highlights close collaboration with artists to encourage experimentation.
While the gallery’s primary location is now in Los Angeles, North Loop West will continue to host occasional programs in Williamstown, Mass.

Image: Benedict Scheuer, Summer, 2024, hand-dyed 16mm Habotai silk, 45 1/2 x 82 in. Image courtesy of the artist.


Touching Grass

North Loop West

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Advertisements and Other Pictures, a solo exhibition by London-based Murray Clarke, his first with the gallery. The exhibition brings together eight oil on canvas paintings that, on surface level, appear to emulate the look, thinking, and lifestyle of prep schools and high society. A complex and self-reflexive act, the paintings interrogate the systems that produce aesthetics, capital, and identity and the ways in which taste, beauty, and class are constructed, circulated, and consumed.

The gestural simplicity of his portraits, taken as a whole, makes up quite a complex of civil manners. In works such as Evening Red (2024), and Beach (2024), the textures of wool, cotton, and synthetic blends are immediate expressions of hierarchy and a repetitive system of visibility about whose bodies and desires are made visible, commodified, and erased. This reorients the exhibition as a whole to visual persuasion while addressing fantasies of selfhood.
In this way, Clarke’s paintings echo and embrace the circulatory logic of the market itself: images made to move endlessly, stripped of origin yet loaded with beautiful history. Made in a medium that defies the digital, and rooted in painstaking observation and slow accumulation, stands as a paradox for the speed and disposability of visual culture. The result is a playful intermingling revealing how the visual economies of the twentieth century still reverberate into the uncertain futures of the twenty-first.

Murray Clarke (b. 1992, London) lives and works in London, England. Clarke graduated from Kingston School of Art in 2019 with an MA in Fine Art. His work explores the dichotomy of emotions surrounding the mass marketing and consumption of fabrics and garments. Through his work, Clarke dissects and questions our attitudes and feelings towards such luxury goods, creating paintings that are at once warm and welcoming yet deceptively cold and superficial. Clarke has had solo exhibitions at Nahmad Projects, London, UK; WOAW Gallery, Singapore; Arden + White, New Cannan, CT; Moosey Gallery, Norwich, UK. Group shows include those at de boer, Los Angeles; MXM Galeria, Madrid, Spain; and Volery Gallery, Dubai.

Murray Clarke: Advertisements and Other Pictures

De Boer Gallery

"Well, here i am" is an immersive exploration into the world of Thalo Halo, a pop artist hailing from the Chicago area. His large hand-painted works on canvas function as a nostalgic odyssey through the lens of Pop Americana.

Thalo Halo: Well, here i am

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

"Glitch" frames the error not merely as a malfunction, but as a definitive rupture. It is a sharp breach where hidden systems inadvertently reveal their presence. When a screen tears, a file corrupts, or a physical structure fractures under unseen stress, this rupture breaks the seamless illusion of control. It offers us a tangible glimpse into the complex architecture that governs our reality.

Featuring Joaquín Stacey-Calle, Jade Lucia Smrz, Kyle Slevira, Shirley Tse, Green Yoon, and Sydney Jung

Glitch

Cevera Yoon Gallery

Zachary Benson Friedberg hits the walls of La Luz de Jesus Gallery again this winter for the newest showcase of paintings titled "Yesterday's Tomorrow". Friedberg acknowledges the nostalgia for the disappearing architecture of Googie style diners across Southern California by mixing them with sci-fiction.

Zachary Benson Friedberg: Yesterday's Tomorrow

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

Nüart Gallery proudly presents “Structured Planes,” an exhibition featuring new works by celebrated abstract painters Rose Masterpol and Lloyd Martin, on view from December 13 through January 4 at the gallery’s Bergamot Station location. This compelling two-person exhibition brings together two artists who, through distinct sensibilities, explore the expressive potentials of geometry, color, and spatial clarity.

Masterpol’s contributions to the exhibition reveal a crisp, assertive visual language rooted in hard-edge abstraction. Her compositions unfold through sharply defined vectors, shifting planes, and chromatic contrasts that infuse her paintings with precision and energy. Each work balances structure and spontaneity, offering a dynamic interplay of controlled form and intuitive gesture.

Martin’s paintings approach structure from a different vantage point. Known for his luminous, layered grids and carefully modulated intervals, Martin builds compositions that evoke architectural rhythm and musical cadence. His surfaces pulse with subtle gradations of color, creating measured spaces that feel at once constructed and atmospheric. The works invite prolonged looking, revealing depth and complexity within their restrained vocabulary.

Together, Masterpol and Martin create a conversation centered on order, rhythm, and the emotive power of abstract form. “Structured Planes” highlights how geometry—handled with clarity and intention—can become a vehicle for thought, mood, and spatial experience. The exhibition underscores each artist’s ability to transform disciplined abstraction into something resonant, contemporary, and deeply human.

Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, December 13, from 3 to 5 PM.

Nüart Gallery
Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA
www.nuartgallery.com

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 424-900-3888.

Image: Rose Masterpol


Structured Planes: Rose Masterpol & Lloyd Martin

Nüart Gallery

7811 Gallery presents: This fall, acclaimed neo-expressionist painter Steven Terrell Cogle brings his dynamic solo exhibition Pop Culture Junkie: A Journey into Black Television, Cinema, and Experiences, 1974–1995 to Gallery 7811 in Los Angeles. This collection is a love letter to a cultural era that shaped Black identity, reinterpreted through the artist’s deeply personal lens and layered, expressive style.

Image: Steven Coogle Greased Lightning (Wendell’s Car), 2022, acrylic and oil stick on stretched canvas, 54” x 60 “ x 1.5. Courtesy of 7811 Gallery

Steven Terrell Cogle: POP CULTURE JUNKIE: A JOURNEY INTO BLACK TELEVISION, CINEMA, AND EXPERIENCES, 1975–1995

7811 Gallery

Michael Kohn Gallery is extremely proud to announce Dorian’s Gardens, an exhibition by New York-based artist Nir Hod. Dorian’s Gardens opens October 11, 2025, and will be on view through January 2026.

This new body of work expands upon Hod’s chrome and oil painting series, 100 Years is Not Enough, an ongoing study of various bodies of water rendered by Hod’s loose yet seductive impressionistic style and iconic chroming, mirror-like technique.

In addition to the new group of lustrous, pastoral landscapes, this exhibition will include intimate works on paper that appear as details of the much larger canvases, a rare realist portrait, a bronze figurative sculpture, and finally the artist’s self-portrait– a nod to both Édouard Manet and the mirror of the exhibition– Dorian Gray.
Most recently, Hod’s work debuted at the House of Dior’s newest flagship store on 57th St. in Manhattan, designed by architect Peter Marino.

In his nearly 30-year career, Hod has consistently delved into the duality of human nature as subject matter for his paintings. The dichotomous themes of beauty and death, flourish and decay, vanity, perfection, destruction, and the overall fragility of life permeate from his earliest bodies of work, such as the Genius and Mother portraits, to his most recent, reflective minimal canvases of the series 100 Years is Not Enough.

100 Years…, Hod’s recent chrome painting series, consists of gestural interpretations of flora floating over bodies of water, akin to a minimalist interpretation of Monet’s Waterlilies. These partially idealized works are not exact renditions of nature but impressions that hover between natural and representational beauty. Hod’s scattered mark-making is complemented by the illusion of shimmering water achieved by multiple applications of reflective metallic chrome. Each composition appears to create a singular ecosystem, a simulacrum of the natural world. Upon close inspection, the spectator finds their own likeness reflected in a painterly surface reminiscent of reality, a visual metaphor of vanity, illusion, and the human condition.

Appropriately titled after Oscar Wilde’s seminal novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Hod pays homage to the iconic character through the highly reflective chromed surface that allows the viewers to consider themselves within the background of Hod’s painting. The spectator is simultaneously a passive onlooker and an active participant in the physical space of the canvas. Nir Hod’s work is visually exquisite but, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, Hod’s painting ultimately betrays its true nature through rough gestures, ghostly traces of color, and a myriad of painterly “mistakes” that proudly reveal beauty and decay as one.

Equally present in Dorian’s Gardens is Hod’s affinity for art history. A palatial ambiance that recalls Old Masters is achieved through color palettes of deep turquoises, jewel- toned reds, and purples melded with black and brown tones. The relaxed brushwork of Life as a Memory, a portrait of a couple taking a stroll, recalls Claude Monet’s expressions. While Hod’s newest sculpture, Lonely girl with tiger, evocates allegoric bronzes from the Renaissance.
Dorian’s Gardens opens October 4, 2025, and will be on view through January 2026. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nir Hod (b. 1970, Tel Aviv, Israel) lives and works in New York. He earned his BFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City in 1991. Hod has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad with his first show in 1996 at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. He has had solo exhibitions at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan, Israel; Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, NY; Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach, FL; and Michael Fuchs Gallery, Berlin, Germany, among others. His work has been in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally from New York to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Israel. These include the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, Berlin, Germany; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Vienna Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Yerba Buena Center for the Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Modern Art, Oostende, Belgium; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY; among others.

ABOUT THE GALLERY
Since its establishment in 1985 by Michael Kohn, Kohn Gallery has presented historically significant exhibitions in Los Angeles alongside exciting contemporary artists, creating meaningful contexts to establish links to a greater art historical continuum. Kohn Gallery represents important West Coast artists with long careers and rich histories such as Joe Goode, Lita Albuquerque, and Sharon Ellis, as well as the Estates of Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, John Altoon and Martha Alf. Kohn Gallery boasts an expanding roster of emerging and mid-career artists including William Brickel, Alicia Adamerovich, Li Hei Di, Chiffon Thomas, Heidi Hahn, Jinbin Chen, Nir Hod, Siji Krishnan, Sophia Narrett, Shiwen Wang, Rosa Loy, and Mark Innerst. Visit kohngallery.com for the latest information on upcoming exhibitions.

Instagram: @KOHNGallery, @nirhod, #NirHod, #michaelkohngallery Press Contact: Elizabeth McNamara, emcnamara@fitzandco.com Gallery Contact: Karys Judd, karys@kohngallery.com

Image: Nir Hod, 100 Years is Not Enough, 2025, oil, chrome and patina on canvas, 72 x 90 inches

Nir Hod: Dorian’s Gardens

Kohn Gallery

Across I Know Her, Sarah Ann Weber locates apertures where the maternal, environmental, and imaginative converge, accumulating dualities that form an ecology of unruliness and resilience. The exhibition’s title gestures to multiple recognitions—the child, the mother, the landscape, the artist herself—each glimpsed, inhabiting a space of flux and perpetual renewal.

_____

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce After Each Night We Are Emptier, including works by: Eve Biddle, Veronica Fernandez, Simon Haas, Hayv Kahraman, Ragen Moss, Veronika Pausova, Mary Ann Unger. 

Sarah Ann Weber: I Know Her | Group Show: After Each Night We Are Emptier

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

Musichead Gallery is proud to present Jersey Poets, a group exhibition of photographs celebrating Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, two visionary artists who emerged from New Jersey to redefine the relationship between music, language, and image.

Featuring work by Adrian Boot, Allan Tannenbaum, Bob Gruen, Danny Clinch, David Gahr, David Rose, Frank Stefanko, Lynn Goldsmith, Neil Zlozower, Norman Seeff, Steve Rapport, and Terry O’Neill, the exhibition brings together portraits and performance photographs that explore how both artists transformed rock and roll into a form of storytelling, spiritual reflection, and personal expression.
While Springsteen and Smith share geographic and generational roots, their creative trajectories reveal distinct approaches to truth and transcendence. Springsteen’s narratives of working-class perseverance echo the rhythms of small-town America, while Smith’s poetic and avant-garde sensibility gave voice to the intellectual and emotional edges of punk. On view are photographs that trace their parallel journeys, capturing moments of performance, collaboration, and persona that illuminate the dynamic balance between realism and symbolism, individuality and community, sound and vision.

The exhibition coincides with the release of Bruce Springsteen’s biopic Deliver Us From Nowhere, the publication of Patti Smith’s memoir Bread of Angels, and her performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Both artists also mark the 50th anniversaries of their debut albums Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and Horses. Through these photographs, Jersey Poets invites viewers to reflect on how two singular voices continue to influence the cultural and visual language of modern music.

We invite you to experience Jersey Poets, where music and photography meet to tell the stories of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, their roots, their visions, and their enduring impact on culture.

Jersey Poets: Bruce Springsteen & Patti Smith
On View: November 14, 2024 to January 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, November 14, 2025 | 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Free with RSVP: https://opening-reception-jersey-poets.eventbrite.com

Metered parking is available on Sunset Boulevard. Ridesharing is encouraged due to limited space. The gallery entrance is wheelchair accessible. For accessibility accommodations, please contact Musichead Gallery in advance.

For additional information, please contact Musichead Gallery at (323) 876-0042 or info@musichead.com, or visit Musichead.com.

Jersey Poets: Bruce Springsteen & Patti Smith

Musichead Gallery

For the opening reception of Pink Morongo, Sara Marlowe Hall invites her husband, musician and composer Matthew Zuk (known as Zuk Zuk), to perform a live improvised composition in response to her paintings. The performance continues their ongoing collaboration Lovers Talk, a project that investigates the intersections of solar fields, composition, scale, space, color, and texture. Zuk Zuk employs synthesized loops, a fretless baritone guitar, and a twelve-string in new standard tuning to create layered soundscapes and textured melodies that accompany Hall’s paintings, translating visual elements into sound and blurring the boundary between painting and performance.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/opening-reception-and-live-performance-sara-marlowe-hall-and-zuk-zuk-tickets-1969972841800?aff=oddtdtcreator

Image: Sara Marlowe Hall
“Across the valley,” 2025
Oil on Linen
17 ⁵⁄₁₆" x 13 ¹⁄₄" x 2" [HxWxD] 
Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles
Photo credit: Brica Wilcox

Sara Marlowe Hall: Pink Morongo

Sidecar is pleased to present Glastonbury, an exhibition organized by Conrad Guevara. The show features new paintings, sculptures, and photography by Night Gallery team members new and old: Adrian Carroll, Deondre Davis, Brian Faucette, Brett Flanigan, William Hathaway, Chip Hughes, Brittany Mack, Mickey Mackenna Dill, Acacia Marable, Nik Massey, Davida & Josh Creations, J Rivera Pansa, Jarret Rubin, Andrea Santos, Charlie Smith, Sebastian Smith, Buzz Szilagyi, Rae Tweed, and Marina Darcy Weiner. This is the final exhibition in our Sidecar space which will transition to becoming part of Night Gallery's main programming in 2026.

12th CENTURY AD: A fire decimates England’s Glastonbury Abbey. To raise rebuilding funds, monks invent a myth that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are buried beneath the grounds.

2007-8: Amy Winehouse performs at Glastonbury Festival, solidifying her reputation as a troubled, once-in-a-generation icon. 

DECEMBER 2025: Conrad Guevara curates Glastonbury at Sidecar, a swan song to the pop-up gallery and to his curatorial program Kill Shelter Presents. 


In early 2023, Conrad Guevara, Night Gallery’s then-head-preparator, began presenting concise exhibitions at the back of NG North. He hung work by artist colleagues on the wall between the preps’ refrigerator and the gallery’s inventory racks. The back-of-house shows became gathering places for the talent that was, literally and figuratively, behind Night Gallery’s public-facing exhibitions. Guevara called the project Kill Shelter Presents (KSP). Management was not consulted about this enterprise.  

Nearly three years later, Guevara has moved on from his role and out of LA. He is handing over KSP to Buzz Szilagyi, now NG head prep. Night Gallery plans to sunset its Sidecar space, following two years of collaborative programming with galleries and curators from near and far. Glastonbury is an ode to the collegial spirit that has animated Sidecar and KSP alike, a graduation of sorts from behind-the-scenes to official exhibition. An intimate, guerilla ethos remains. 

Guevara notes that the Glastonbury music festival unites a broad range of bands, from the uber-famous to the unknown. In his show, he groups artists into three categories: performers, production, and crowd control. Jarret Rubin’s central painting The One (2025) features a singer looking out over a crowd. Buzz Szilagyi, Rae Tweed, and Deondre Davis contribute their own figurative works, side acts to this headliner. Brett Flanigan’s framed ceramic triangles resemble beams of stage lighting, while Chip Hughes’s psychedelic, carved-wood painting suggests a chemically altered, music festival state. Charlie Smith presents a wood “Sky Cabinet” sculpture that recalls refracted light and energy. Andrea Santos’ vibrational drawing conjures amplified sound. Davida Nemeroff, Seb Smith, and Marina Darcy Weiner make sculptures that evoke barricades and demarcate patterns of flow. Guevara himself serves as club promoter for this motley crew. 

Glastonbury celebrates the connections forged at the gallery, where disparate, creative personalities unite to ship, mount, promote, and sell show after show. Guevara notes the sea foam hue of Sidecar’s walls. “The green room,” he says, “is where everyone wants to be.”
 
—Alina Cohen

Image: Brittany Mack, Fornication, 2025. Photography by Nik Massey.

Conrad Guevara: Glastonbury

Sidecar

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice, an exhibition by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from November 1, 2025 through January 10th, 2026, with an opening reception on November 1, from 4-6pm.

After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Gschwandtner looked back to the “pre-Roe” era, drawing on early film and familial memory to explore how women have taken control of their bodies and lives. Working with black-and-white 35mm film, etching ink on film, thread, and video, she presents twelve film quilts and a single-channel video that expand the concept of “filmic suture” into a three-dimensional, materially embodied cinematic form. Through her research-based and materially grounded practice, the artist stitches together a lineage of bodily autonomy and resistance.

Two early films directed by women anchor the exhibition. The first, Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 film Madame’s Cravings, portrays a pregnant protagonist who gleefully disrupts social norms — stealing absinthe, tobacco, and candy while her partner tends to their child. Her untamed desires and public act of childbirth, captured more than a century ago, subvert prescribed ideals of maternal propriety and bodily control. Gschwandtner heightens this subversion by hand-painting passages of the film — green for absinthe, and yellow, red, and blue for the lollipop — transforming the protagonist’s cravings into vivid, material expressions of desire and agency. The second film, a 1931 documentary by Marvin Breckinridge, chronicles the Frontier Nursing Service, which delivered maternal care by horseback in rural Appalachia and dramatically reduced maternal and infant mortality rates. Together, these films challenge the omission of reproductive life on screen. After the implementation of the 1934 Hays Code, depictions of pregnancy and childbirth disappeared from American cinema for decades. By revisiting works made before this period, Gschwandtner recovers a visual history that resists the cultural erasure of reproductive experience.

This exhibition also debuts a new “video quilt,” a hybrid form the artist has developed over the last eight years. Resembling a patchwork quilt, the work interlaces archival film, handwritten text, and a recorded interview with the artist’s mother, who recounts obtaining an illegal abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade. The video models forms of agency, showing women asserting control over their bodies and narratives, even under restrictive and oppressive conditions.

Gschwandtner has exhibited internationally, at the Victoria & Albert Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among many others. Her 8-channel video Later in Life, commissioned by the Skirball Cultural Center, is currently on view at the museum. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public and private collections worldwide. She earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Bard College.

Sabrina Gschwandtner: Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

In our gallery in East Hollywood, Track 16 presents a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Camilla Taylor. In the exhibition titled Unkindness, Taylor explores both the vacuum of loss and the emergence into a new world and new self – radically unlike the past. Multiple bronze works – representations of the body – suggest an emptiness, a blackout. Cast from hand-sculpted clay and wax, they function as preservations of something made then lost. Stray, a larger than life human mandible, uncannily imbues itself with uncertainty and, separated from its body, threatens like an omen. Stomach, a bronze lidded container, holds inside a scented wax that visitors may sample. Taylor designed the scent to mimic how people have described the smell of scientific clean rooms, where hallucinations are induced by the brain in response to the lack of olfactory stimulus. Adding a waterfall inside a bronze torso, a square bowl with the imprint of a breast, a glass ear, and a roped glass foot amplifies the richly enigmatic vocabulary of the body that has developed.

Taylor began 2025 with a residency at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology in Oregon. Early morning, January 7, 2025, Taylor packed their car to return home. After more than a dozen hours on the road, their neighborhood came into sight along with a menacing glow behind it. Within moments of arriving home, Taylor, their partner, and four cats were fighting catastrophic winds to flee the approaching wildfire. This collection of bronze, copper, glass, and fabric sculptures was created in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire that destroyed Taylor’s home and studio in Altadena. Working out of borrowed studios, they salvaged, recreated, and conceived anew works for this exhibition, which had been planned since before the devastating fire. 

Recent residencies for Taylor had allowed deeper examination of the natural world. During a 2024 residency on Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest, Taylor sculpted and cast bronze blackberry branches. Sanctuary – the only artwork in the current exhibition that survived and were blackened by the flames – are stacked into a triangular-shaped structure. In pagan witchcraft this is a symbol for fire or water, depending on the triangle’s orientation. Introduced to the Northwest in the 19th century, the thriving Himalayan blackberry is a bane and a bonus. The berries are everywhere to eat, but have effectively crowded out native plants and upset the balance of the ecosystem. That push-pull is reminiscent of fire in California, where, historically, it was a natural cycle for a healthy system. Contemporary suppression protects communities near the forests, but the build-up of fuel creates conditions for overwhelming destruction. 

While at the Sitka Artist Residency, they began a piece about the transformative consuming power of destructive rage, Harpy. A breastplate fashioned from etched copper feathers. Simultaneously to making this piece about rage, the deeply affecting experience of rescuing a wild bird, a Pacific loon, whose gentleness is evident in the delicate rendition of the feathers.

Describing themselves as having a “toxic Protestant work ethic,” Taylor spent the year in a string of donated studios forming this exhibition that addresses the emotions of loss, vulnerability, and the inevitability of change. What are we left with when our home, work, and surroundings are destroyed but soft human forms – which Taylor has made hard and frozen as objects. They lay bare the struggles of the human experience – using direct haunting language that questions mortality at the mercy of destructive forces, manmade and natural.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camilla Taylor is recognized for their monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture, which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society.
An accomplished artist exhibiting in traditional gallery spaces, they also create installations in intimate and unusual locations, such as site-specific works in a swimming pool, desert garden, and other locations. They are represented by Track 16 in Los Angeles and Kanda & Oliveira in Tokyo.

Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011. 

Taylor lives in Los Angeles, CA, with their partner and 4 cats, and teaches at Occidental College and UCLA.

Camilla Taylor: Unkindness

Track 16 | East Hollywood

BEYOND THE STREETS presents SHEPARD FAIREY: OUT OF PRINT, a landmark exhibition celebrating the rebellious, democratic force of ink and paper. Featuring over 400 screen prints and new hybrid works, the show traces Fairey’s evolution across three decades—from guerrilla interventions to globally recognized icons—spotlighting his lifelong dialogue with printmaking and the power of mass communication.

Through posters, album art, stencils, and layered editions, OUT OF PRINT highlights how Fairey harnesses the language of advertising and propaganda to provoke thought and inspire action. The exhibition captures the tactile immediacy of print in an increasingly digital world—affirming that “printing still matters.”

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–6 PM
More Information: https://beyondthestreets.com/blogs/articles/beyond-the-streets-presents-shepard-fairey-out-of-print 


SHEPARD FAIREY: OUT OF PRINT

Beyond The Streets

NOON Projects is honored to present "Corner Time," a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matt Lifson. Through careful engagement with the canon of narrative painting—particularly the social realists of the early 20th century—"Corner Time" presents a series of intimate portraits that reflect the social temperature and malaise of the present moment.

Lifson’s third exhibition with the gallery centers on his queer community in Los Angeles. His portraits capture friends he’s met over the past fifteen years, tracing the intimacy and trust that form his circle and revealing the shared tenderness at the heart of queer connection.

"Corner Time" also marks a significant development in Lifson’s painting practice and approach to exhibition-making. Whereas earlier bodies of work began with a preconceived concept and drew from screen-based media—horror films, vintage pornography, and digitally manipulated imagery—this series emerged quietly and organically. Lifson chose to create one painting at a time, working on an easel on smaller canvases in closer dialogue with the body. The source material for these works originated in one-on-one sessions between the artist and his subjects.

Looking to artists such as Vermeer, Cadmus, Wyeth, and Neel-with particular emphasis on Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and the Social Realist painters who illuminated working-class life, Lifson draws on this lineage to frame the present. His portraits depict queer people at home, surrounded by the familiar objects of contemporary life: flat-pack furniture, safety-pin earrings, houseplants, trinkets, and souvenirs. Within these domestic spaces, he positions his subjects in the corner - a charged site historically associated with discipline, marginalization, and entrapment.

The resulting paintings capture unedited, candid moments within domestic spaces: a figure hunched over a lava lamp in a dimly lit room; a hazy Sunday morning in bed; a lover caught getting dressed through an open bathroom door. Lifson’s gaze peers behind the curtain of his subjects’ lives in a way that feels more ethnographic than voyeuristic. In doing so, he performs what artists have always been called to do: to look both within and without, observing, focusing, and faithfully depicting what he sees.

Unlike Vermeer’s portraits of the middle class, Lifson’s paintings focus on a queer class, rendered in the tones and textures of the current moment.  Lifson resists inflated optimism, instead offering an unembellished record of contemporary life. "Corner Time" punctuates the here and now without offering answers— instead offering an observation, dimly lit, in the corner, grounded in honesty. 

For more information email info@noon-projects.com

Matt Lifson: Corner Time

NOON Projects

Fulcrum Arts is pleased to present, Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat, featuring works developed around the artist’s August 2025 crossing of the Catalina Channel in a kayak made of mushroom mycelium.  
 
Alongside the mushroom boat itself, the exhibition features large-scale projections, time-lapse videos, and soundscapes that immerse visitors in Shoemaker’s journey over 26 nautical miles of open ocean, where he passed through turbulent water, encountered wildlife, crossed a commercial shipping lane, and battled headwind.  
 
Visitors will also witness the artist’s process of constructing the mushroom boat.   
 
“Shoemaker’s work explores the potential of sustainable materials in unprecedented ways,” remarks Patrick J. Reed, curator at Fulcrum Arts. “His crossing of the Catalina Channel in a boat made of mushroom mycelium prompts us to recognize that innovative creative practices can guide our efforts toward ecologically responsible modes of inventing, exploring, and living our lives.”  
  
Additionally, Shoemaker is releasing an open-source compendium detailing his mycological research and methodologies. A hard copy will be exhibited and a digital version will be freely accessible. Shoemaker releases this document with the hope that others will carry his research forward, using fungi—an organic, versatile, and renewable resource—to pursue responsible technical and creative innovations.    
  
Mushroom Boat marks the first major exhibition held at Fulcrum Arts’ new headquarters in Pasadena, California.           

About the artist
Sam Shoemaker is a Los Angeles-based sculpture artist whose work is a collaboration between himself and species of mushrooms. Shoemaker’s work has been shown at Craft Contemporary, Armory Center for the Arts, Vielmetter, David Horvitz’s Garden, Make Room, Emma Gray HQ, and OCHI, among others. He was also included in World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project at the California African American Museum, an official exhibition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide presented by Getty. Shoemaker has been featured in many publications and news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Galerie Magazine, W Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Graphite. He lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by OCHI.

www.samkshoemaker.com

Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat is made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Perenchio Foundation, and the Pasadena Arts and Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.

Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat

Fulcrum Arts

Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to announce Still Life, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Kohshin Finley. Marking his most ambitious presentation to date, the exhibition brings together monumental oil portraits integrated with ceramic vessels, seamlessly merging painting, poetry, sculpture, and design into an immersive installation rooted in memory, material, and personal mythology.

Finley, whose Black-Mexican identity and upbringing in Los Angeles anchor his practice, returns to Jeffrey Deitch after his celebrated inclusion in Shattered Glass (2021). With Still Life, he deepens his commitment to portraying his community through a lens of tenderness and truth, presenting a series of life sized portraits framed in handcrafted walnut vitrines, which also house vessels of his own making. This exhibition extends his formal language of transparency and layering, allowing the understructure of charcoal, gesso, and gestural poetry to surface as both visual and emotional code. 

“My paintings hold moments of intimacy and care,” Finley states. “There’s poetry embedded in the underpainting, not always legible but always present, like the stories we carry in our bodies. The ceramics extend that language, they’re ancestral, functional, symbolic.”

Influenced by time spent in Los Angeles, Japan, Italy, and Mexico, Finley’s ceramics reflect a dialogue between contemporary portraiture and the timelessness of the vessel. The work honors craft traditions while asserting a distinctly modern narrative: the ceramic becomes a witness, a container, and a collaborator in portraiture.

Kohshin Finley, a native Angeleno, has been steeped in creative expression since childhood, raised by artist and fashion designer parents who nurtured his early immersion in the arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Hummingbird at Barbati Gallery (Venice, IT) and Eight Artworks at Various Small Fires (Dallas, TX). Last year, a career-defining work by Finley was acquired by the Hammer Museum for its permanent collection.

Finley’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Jack Shainman Gallery, and CFHill in Stockholm. His paintings and sculptures are held in esteemed public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Hammer Museum, Marciano Art Foundation and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He and his work have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Cultured, Essence, and The Cut, and was named one of Fine Art Connoisseur’s “Five to Watch." 

Kohshin Finley: Still Life

Jeffrey Deitch | Santa Monica

Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to present Walk on the Moon, an exhibition of new work by Alteronce Gumby, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Structured around four separate yet intertwined movements that incorporate each facet of Gumby’s ever-evolving practice—from painting, to sculpture, to installation and sound—Walk on the Moon presents the latest discoveries and innovations from his sustained research into and exploration of the material properties of color and how they shape human perception.

A pillar of Gumby’s work and primary vehicle for his experimentation with color has been a form of abstract painting entirely his own, one that incorporates mirrors and acrylics, colored glass and a vast array of gemstones, from agate to quartz, lapis to malachite. In a suite of six new square ‘tonal’ paintings, Gumby organizes his palette around a single color unique to each one, resulting in intensely concentrated expressions of a given hue or tonality. 

Placed throughout each composition are ‘organites’ that Gumby creates using gemstones, conductive metals and resin. Channeling the energetic properties of color into each organite, Gumby deploys them as magnifiers of that very energy. Though the shifting and shimmering surfaces of each painting change according to the available light in a given environment, several remain anchored by the presence of sacred geometry—the square, pyramid and circle—hovering within their compositions. Along with the inclusion of our mirrored reflection, these fundamental forms open up portals for the imagination.

Gumby’s expansive command of abstraction is further revealed by an eclectic group of paintings that accompany the tonal works. In three ‘Black-body’ paintings, Gumby manipulates and forms resin into strips of prismatic color that evoke the full spectrum of primary color that refracts through light. Four ‘falling rainbow’ paintings made of monochromatic resin with gemstones suspended within are affixed with naturally and synthetic dyed silks that flow down from the picture plane and pool onto the gallery floor, allowing Gumby to explore the transition of color from the material to the immaterial. 

In Color in Nature (2025) Gumby joins together five colored resin squares, with the palette and corresponding gemstone within each made to express both the idea and experience of the photographic image embedded within. Completing this movement is one of the largest shaped paintings Gumby has made yet, Dancing in the Milky Way (2025), that staggers two horizontal panels together, one atop the other—their radiant surfaces evoking the cosmos itself.

Continuing his investigation into the different ways color can be felt, seen or understood, Gumby has created new monolithic resin sculptures that reference the same color palette as the tonal paintings. Alternating between density and translucency, between opacity and luminosity, these hulking yet ethereal objects capture the way color is transfigured by passing through material. Each sculpture presents a concentrated expression of red, blue, green, yellow or violet and contains gemstones suspended within them.

The final movement of Walk on the Moon and one that synthesizes the preceding forays into color, material, experience and time, is an installation that harnesses the natural light that pours into the gallery via its skylights. Taking naturally and synthetic dyed silks and affixing them to the skylights to create what Gumby calls ‘light wells,’ these sculptural iterations of the ‘falling rainbow’ paintings reconsider the very materiality of color and its atmospheric or environmental quality. This room will also function as an experimental space where invited artists working with sound will stage one-day performances, offering their own vision of what color is and how it can be experienced. The fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the installation demonstrates the boundlessness of Gumby’s practice as he endeavors to understand color as both an earthly fact and abstract idea.

Alteronce Gumby was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and now resides in New York City. He received his BFA from Hunter College in 2013 and his MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2016. He was a resident artist at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, in 2019. In 2017, he completed a residency as the Harriet Hale Woolley scholar at the Fondation des Etats-Unis in Paris. Solo exhibitions include Walk on the Moon, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2025); If Herr Street Could Talk, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrison, PA (2025); Prince of the Far Rainbow, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Dark Matter, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA (2022); Cross Colours, Bode Projects, Berlin (2021); Alteronce Gumby: My Favorite Color is a Rainbow, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles (2020) and Black(ness) is Beautiful, the Foundation des Etats-Unis, Paris (2017). Group exhibitions include The Abstract Future, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2025); Social Abstraction, Gagosian, Los Angeles (2024); Alteronce Gumby | Charles Ross, Parrasch Heijnen gallery, Los Angeles (2024); The 100 years, Gagosian x Deitch Exhibition, Miami (2022) and For Freedoms, Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH (2018). The artist’s work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Columbus Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, Allentown Art Museum, and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Image: Love Saves the Day, 2025, Red jasper, quartz, copper, resin, glass, and acrylic on panel
72 x 72 inches 
Photos by Genevieve Hanson.
Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.

Alteronce Gumby: Walk on the Moon

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce, Your Tears Will Dry, a solo exhibition of new works by Kiriakos Tompolidis. The exhibition will be on view from November 15, 2025, through January 17, 2026 and marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

The paintings included in this exhibition are deeply influenced by Tompolidis’ recent move to Mexico City from Berlin, incorporating the color palette, visual sensibilities, and the endemic flora and fauna of his new environment into meticulous portrayals of memories and emotional states. Much of his practice grapples with his perception of being in between cultures and places, articulating both the parallels and fissures between his adopted home and his native country of Greece. The paintings depict subjects who seem to vacillate between feelings of displacement and familiarity, fragility and resolve, with a granular attention given to the patinas and patterns of their surroundings.

In the painting Under the Bougainvillea, a young version of Tompolidis stands in front of an ornately patterned doorway, a vivid fuchsia Bougainvillea cascading over the architecture while stray cats lounge nearby. Like in many of his paintings, photo transfers and other artifacts are seamlessly integrated into the composition – Bougainvillea leaves from Greece are delicately woven in among the petals, and the tactility of the floor tiles is enhanced with collaged elements. The diptych acts as a bridge between disparate times and locations, exposing the surprising similarities between the plants, animals, and vernacular architecture of the artist’s childhood memories of Greece with his more recent experiences in Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Tompolidis’ paintings occupy an ambiguous and atemporal space that draws from family histories, lived experience, and dreams, and that is made tangible through intricately rendered textures and surface treatments. Patterns in textiles, architecture, and nature function as signifiers of place, time, and cultural context. In the work Her Reflection Tompolidis depicts his grandmother as a young woman, capturing her pensive smile in the mirror of her vanity and the small cross necklace and family portrait sitting atop her dresser. The artist’s grandmother reappears in the titular work Your Tears Will Dry, a trompe l’oeil painting of the back of a canvas inscribed with the phrase she often repeated, and which was formative in his understanding of perseverance. Some of the paintings present an unvarnished realism while others teeter into the surreal, so that collectively they offer a richly detailed view of a space between reality and recollection.

About the artist

Kiriakos Tompolidis (b.1997, Essen, Germany) is a Berlin-based artist holding degrees from Freie Universität Berlin and University of Arts, Berlin, Germany.

He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Judin, Berlin, Germany; Labor, Mexico City, Mexico; Miettinen Collection, Berlin, Germany; The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA, and is currently included in the 14th Taipei Biennial Whispers on the Horizon, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

His work has been included in group shows at North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Green Family Foundation, Dallas, TX; Bode Gallery, Berlin, Germany, among others.

He is represented by Galerie Judin in Berlin and will have a solo exhibition next year at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany.

Kiriakos Tompolidis: Your Tears Will Dry

Hamilton-Selway Fine Art is pleased to invite you to Throughline: The Continuum of Art, a presentation that brings together contemporary voices and the blue-chip masters who shaped the landscape they work within. This exhibition reflects the ongoing conversation between eras, showing how ideas and techniques evolve while remaining connected across time.

For nearly three decades, our gallery has championed the artists who define Pop and Contemporary art. Throughline continues this commitment—placing our strongest established artworks in dialogue with a new generation whose perspectives feel both timely and in step with that legacy. It’s a rare chance to view these artworks together and see how each enriches the other.

More importantly, it offers our collectors an intimate look at significant artworks available today, whether driven by the timeless pull of an icon or the excitement of discovering a rising voice.

We look forward to welcoming you into the gallery and sharing this moment with you.

Throughline: Continuum of Art

Hamilton Selway

From my earliest days to my most recent pieces, I have always been inhabited by color, yet I am still looking for its mysterious soul. - Olga de Amaral

Lisson Gallery Los Angeles is honored to present a focused survey of works by renowned Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, marking her first solo exhibition in the city in almost a decade. Spanning from the early 1970s through 2018, the exhibition traces key developments in Amaral’s influential, six-decade career and her singular practice that dissolves the boundaries between weaving, painting, and sculpture. Through landmark works of varying scale and format, the show offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with Amaral’s unique visual and material language, interlacing linen, wool, horsehair, Japanese paper, acrylic, and precious metals into luminous, sculptural forms that shimmer with historical, spiritual, and environmental resonance.

The works on view bear witness to the determined plurality of Amaral’s art since the 1970s. Materials including horsehair, Japanese paper, and gold and palladium leaf combine to produce a fluid, emotional and aesthetic register, one that fluctuates between the epic and the intimate, the material and the spiritual. In two distinct works, created nearly forty years apart, Amaral has suspended a woven structure from the ceiling. Eslabón familiar (1973) consists of a rope-like length of horsehair that loops with Baroque intricacy around a larger loop-shaped armature. By contrast with the internal dynamism of this early work, Nudo 19 (turquesa) (2014) takes the form of a slender column of turquoise-dyed linen threads, stiffened with gesso and tied in a single knot towards the top. The object appears both airborne and earthbound, magnifying a simple gesture at the core of all weaving to a grand scale.

Throughout the exhibition, twin elements of ornate complexity and disciplined simplicity can be seen to alternate and combine. A rare and monumental work from Amaral’s acclaimed Alquimia series, Alquimia 41 (díptico), will be featured prominently on the west wall of the gallery. Created in 1987, this diptych is one of the largest examples from Amaral’s most extensive body of work through which she has explored the transformative nature of alchemy. Infused with the luminosity of gold leaf, the work reflects both the sacred materiality of pre-Columbian traditions and the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi. Such ritualistic associations become more concrete in Memento 9 (2016), in which tightly-layered strips of linen form a grid, overlaid with gold leaf. Also on view is work from the Soles series, which relate closely to her Estelas (1996–2018), a larger body of gold leaf works. As the title Soles (Suns) suggests, Amaral’s use of gold emphasizes the luminosity of the material. Her deft manipulation of the surface, built up with many layers of gesso, lends a solid, sculptural weight to these works, which nonetheless maintain a sense of movement and ephemerality evocative of the natural world.

The grid structure reappears in two works from the Nébulas series (2014–19), where segments of Japanese paper, saturated in deep greens and blues, are overlaid with geometric or radial motifs. A related interplay of structure and light is evident in Agua azul (2018), where vertical strips of painted paper are folded over linen threads and suspended away from the wall, allowing light to pass through and produce a shimmer reminiscent of cascading water. This dualism between solidity and transparency, the earth and the sky, can also be traced back to early monumental works like Paisaje de calicanto (1983), in which light is integral to the woven form. However, unlike the artworks such as the Nébulas, which reference the cosmos in their palette and construction, Paisaje de calicanto’s rich colors are rooted in the artist’s native Colombian landscape.

Amaral’s studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the mid-1950s proved to be a transformative experience for the artist, introducing her to weaving and thus providing a technical outlet for a fascination that had begun in childhood: “I learned about the loom, which I saw as another way of working and constructing things,” she has explained. “I became interested in fiber, in thread, because weaving allowed for invention.” Upon returning to Colombia, she began to make handwoven textiles, and from the late 1960s she increasingly aligned her creations with ‘fine art’ genres, initiating a dismantling of the boundary between craft and art that would come to define her output. The current exhibition follows upon institutional displays that have confirmed Amaral’s position within an expanded history of art. These include ‘Woven Histories’, which opened at LACMA in 2023 and subsequently travelled to three other venues, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and a large-scale retrospective that travelled from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2024) to ICA Miami (2025).

Olga de Amaral

Lisson Gallery

In wartime, beauty is not frivolous. Claude Monet, as bombs echoed near his garden at Giverny during World War I, continued to paint his water lilies — a radical act of continuity. 

The title of this group exhibition, curated by Shelley Holcomb, echoes “lacrimae rerum” (Latin: “the tears of things”) from Virgil’s Aeneid — a poignant expression of the sorrow embedded in the human experience.

Things Themselves Have Tears brings together works created during and in the aftermath of war: paintings, drawings, sculptures, and textiles — gestures arising from societal fracture. 

Daniel Adolfo’s abstractions translate memory and displacement into emotional landscapes. Salomón Huerta’s surfaces transform the ordinary into charged terrain. Samala Meza reimagines modernist abstraction through feminine experience. Christine Olowonira elevates the ant as a luminous metaphor for feminine strength. Pauline Shaw’s felted textiles weave ancestral patterns and scientific imagery into porous landscapes of remembrance. Lauren Fejarang’s sculptural compositions evoke the persistence of natural forms. 

Things Themselves Have Tears invites viewers to sit with this tension: to make art in wartime is not always an act of hope. Sometimes it is ritual. Sometimes it is refusal. Sometimes it is simply a way to live another day. The psyche craves evidence that not all is lost. Beauty reminds us of our humanity.

Image: Salomón Huerta "Gun with Tangerines," 2025


Things Themselves Have Tears

House of CoHit

Sustainers of Life, co-curated by Cecelia Caro and Laurie Steelink, features seven artists exploring intersectional themes through installation, sculpture, photography, illustration, and painting. The exhibition addresses colonialism’s impact, motherhood, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis while also celebrating individual stories of resilience and survival.

Artists Weshoyot Alvitre, Emily Clarke, Katie Dorame, Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain, Cara Romero, Corey Stein, and Linda Vallejo create works that depict Native and Indigenous women as multidimensional beings. Honoring women as sustainers of cultural knowledge and community healing, this exhibition weaves together personal narratives within broader historical contexts. Through diverse media, the exhibition creates space for both mourning losses and celebrating the ongoing resilience of those who nurture and protect life.

Image: Katie Dorame, Our Land (detail), 2024. Inkjet print. Illustration from the book Toypurina: Japchavit Leader, Medicine Woman, Tongva Rebel

Support for the exhibitions program is provided by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the Perenchio Foundation, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

Accessibility
Please note that portions of Sustainers of Life are in areas of the gallery that are currently only accessible via stairs. A virtual walkthrough of the full exhibition will be available on a tablet at the front of the gallery.

Sustainers of Life

Angels Gate Cultural Center

For her first Los Angeles solo exhibition in two decades, British artist Anj Smith will debut new works that explore the connections between art, mysticism, female agency and philosophy. Rich in detail, color and texture, Smith’s new paintings collapse strict definitions of portraiture, landscape and still life while allowing elements of each to coexist. 

Amid ecological devastation, her wildly feral settings, ambiguous nudes, and exotic flora and fauna urge the possibility of a contemporary transcendence. Smith draws upon sources as disparate as the myth of Narcissus, the writings of philosopher Simone Weil and short stories by medieval poet Marie de France, disrupting expectation within a present-day cosmos all her own.

Anj Smith: The Sequin-Strewn Night

Hauser & Wirth | WEHO

Gateless Gate II: Ritual of Returning
Act II of a Three-Part Trilogy
Presented by a poco art collective

Opening: Sunday, December 14, 3–6pm
On view through January 25, 2026
4505 S Slauson Ave, Unit 317, Culver City, CA 90230

“The gate has no gate.
Approach, and it closes.
Stop approaching, and it opens.”

The second chapter of the Gateless Gate trilogy steps into the womb-space of a poco art collective — a room held low to the floor, scented with tide and breath, arranged as a soft threshold rather than a gallery. Here the koan does its quiet work: form unfastens, edges blur, and artworks behave like membranes, not objects.

Visitors leave their shoes at the door. The body lowers; the senses rise.

Sandeep Mukherjee’s duralene surfaces tremble like weather caught between worlds.
Relational (Dana Berman Duff & Shirley Tse) bend the window into a lunar aperture, while Douglas Farrand’s tidal score drifts through the space with the patience of moons.
Stella Zhang’s textile forms draw breath into folds and voids.
Nancy Evans lets cosmic desire bloom in silhouettes that hover between icon and echo.
Flora Kao stains light into cyanotype: butterflies flicker, memory unfurls, a question hangs in the air — "Am I dreaming the world, or is the world dreaming me?"

Constance Braden’s Six Chakras align on black paper like small, radiant thresholds.

“When the Buddha held up a flower, Mahākāśyapa smiled.”
No doctrine, no explanation. The transmission happens in the pause.

This exhibition turns toward that pause — the moment before meaning hardens, the breath before return. "Ritual of Returning" does not seek nostalgia. It seeks recognition, the quiet realization that what you have been searching for has been waiting at the center of your own body all along.

Press & Inquiries
Ann Shi — ann@apoco.art
Instagram: @a.poco.art.collective
www.apoco.art

Gateless Gate II: Ritual of Returning

a poco art archive

Taking inspiration from art historical genres, ranging from French rococo and Italian baroque to abstract expression, British artist Flora Yukhnovich’s paintings explore materiality and process through cascading forms that shift between representation and abstraction. For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Yukhnovich will present her latest body of work, a series of canvases inspired by Bacchanalia. 

Addressing the excesses of consumerism and popular culture, her lush, swirling brushstrokes evoke the dynamism and intense corporeality of both ancient and contemporary hedonism. A catalogue featuring an extensive selection of illustrations by Yukhnovich, along with a text by curator Eleanor Nairne, will accompany the exhibition. 

‘Bacchanalia’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles will coincide with ‘Flora Yukhnovich's Four Seasons’ at The Frick Collection in New York (3 September 2025 – 9 March 2026), a site-specific mural in response to François Boucher’s Four Seasons series.

Image: Detail of Flora Yukhnovich

______

‘Lee Lozano. Hard Handshake’ brings together over 100 drawings by the artist, spanning the years 1959 to 1968. Lee Lozano made these provocative drawings at a remarkably fast pace, using a variety of artistic styles. Informed by the artist’s unsparing eye and wry humor, they dissect such societal norms as gender roles and property ownership while challenging the commodification of art and, ultimately, all conventional aspects of life.

Shown together, Lozano’s drawings embody her unbridled energy and social consciousness, radical for their time, and continue to provoke questions today. Although rarely exhibited during her lifetime, this body of work is instrumental to understanding the singular trajectory of Lozano's practice. In conjunction with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release ‘In the Studio,’ a new book focused on Lozano’s life and work, written by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.

Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia | Lee Lozano: Hard Handshake

Hauser & Wirth DTLA

Inner Landscapes is a collaborative installation by Lauren Kim, Enoch Ma, and Jane Zhang, created in partnership with Dr. Han Jik Kim of Hajo Holistic. Addressing the accumulated uses, neglects, and imagined futures of MacArthur Park, the project draws on traditional East Asian medical practices as tools for historical and artistic inquiry. Through these diagnostic methods, the park’s netted, unruly past begins to surface, set along the fertile verge between memory and matter, private and public, nature and culture.

Taking inspiration from the Neijing Tu—a Taoist diagram mapping the spirit’s journey through the body’s interior terrain—and guided by the Wu Xing cycle of creation and destruction, the work reimagines MacArthur Park as a living enmeshment, animated by elemental flows, vicinal blockages, and latent energies. Here, archived proposals, geologic histories, and even bird droppings become diagnostic markers—substrates through which the park’s inner landscape begins to unravel.

Each Wednesday from 2–5 PM, the installation transforms into a community acupuncture pop-up, offering free services to the public by appointment—relocating the metaphor of healing from the landscape to the body itself.
SIGN UP FOR AN APPOINTMENT BEGINNING NOV. 20th via our website:
https://www.goethe.de/losangeles


Admission is free.
All ages are welcome.
Light refreshments provided

PROGRAM:
6:30 PM Doors open.
7:15 PM Welcoming + Introduction + Opening Ritual
9:00 PM End of Event


Dr. Han Jik Kim, L Ac., D.O.M. is a licensed acupuncturist and educator with over 25 years of experience in clinical practice and teaching. He is an expert on acupuncture, herbal medicine, and classic oriental medicine texts. He runs Hajo Holistic in Macarthur Park, Los Angeles with his daughter Lauren. 

Lauren Kim is a place-based researcher and artist whose work explores landscape, healing, and systems of knowledge. Working primarily with paper, metal, and natural materials, her professional and artistic practices bridge ecological processes with embodied experience. She is one half of the creative collective Cloud6.

Enoch Ma is an artist and builder whose work spans a range of materials and scales. Drawing from close observations of the natural world, his practice considers the enduring patterns of nature and how they find reflection within us. He is currently a MFA student in sculpture at Cal State Long Beach.
Enochma.com

Jane Zhang is a scholar of popular literature and vernacular medicine. She is currently doing a PhD at Yale and writes about snuff boxes, tin figures, and the stereoscope. She is the other half of the creative collective Cloud6.

INNER LANDSCAPES
is on view November 20, 2025 - January 29, 2026.

Goethe-Institut LA 
1901 W. 7th St. Suite AB, Los Angeles, CA 90057

During Office Hours: 
Tuesday–Thursdays: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Fridays: 10:00 am – 3:00 pm 

The Goethe-Institut is closed to the public on Mondays and on weekends, unless otherwise noted.
The Goethe-Institut will be closed November 24-28, 2025 and from December 22 - January 2, 2026

Secure, free Parking is available at Metro/Retail parking structure with rear entrance to the Goethe-Institut located at
674 S. Westlake Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90057

Public transport is possible with the red line to MacArthur Park/Westlake stop. Using carpool or ride-share options are appreciated.

INNER LANDSCAPES is part of the Neighborhood Interpretive Center, a hyperlocal initiative of cultural programs that focus on and uplift the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood and surrounding areas.

INNER LANDSCAPES: A Pulse Reading of MacArthur Park

Goethe-Institut LA

“Grief-broken stranger, rest thee underneath
These shady bowers; if wine can make thee glad,
Enter this pleasant place, and drink thy fill.”	
– from The Sháh Námeh by Hakīm Abol-Qāsem Firdawsī Ṭūsī

The 2000 Sydney Olympics beautifully embodied Australian egalitarianism and a sort of rough play. I was 22 at the time. At some point while watching, the devastating revelation that I would never be an Olympian hit me. It should not have been a surprise – I was 300 lbs and had no interest in athletics, but it was my first realization that time flows ruthlessly in one direction. Luckily, CBS played reruns of Survivor opposite the games. A national phenomena, a contra-olympics, where you could watch maladapted young people wallow in a jungle, eat fish entrails, and backstab each other for money.

Where am I going with this? The advent of Survivor is also when I started my ongoing mental exercise of "team building." I like to construct imaginary teams to solve interesting or thorny problems. Want to sink Jeff Bezos’ yacht? Send in one high-end bartender with carpentry experience, one retired Navy ER nurse, and one exquisitely bitter classical pianist.
 
Curatorial practices are a notable version of this game. Having the opportunity to organize a three-person show at Track 16, I chose a hypothetical prompt on which to create our team. Which artists would I want to team up with to build a new museum and botanical gardens à la The Huntington? Cathy Akers and Lela Shahrzad became that dream team. Both artists bring vivid imagination to complex mediums in a way which looks effortless. Along with myself, our trio has differing skill sets but human-scale work with a sense of grandeur and some acidity.

– Chris Ulivo 


In the shadow of our everyday reality are the shadows of stories, our uncertain histories, and alternative timelines. Reimagining our new present springing from altered choices in the past rubs against the weight of destiny – of the impossibility of anything being different. Maybe in the quantum world a particle can go back in time and tell its partner how to change and when, but either way we live in the classical world where most of the past and all the future is hidden. Akers, Welch, and Ulivo each passionately grapple with past and future.

Cathy Akers’ artistic practice has long focused on utopian societies. Through a lens of fantasy and infused with a sense of the absurd, Akers’ ceramic sculptures imagine a female-centric world informed both by classics of modern utopian feminist literature and her ongoing research into modern attempts at communal living. 

Drawing on a history of assemblage, textiles, and storytelling, Lela Shahrzad Welch – acting as a seeker of a culture rather than a participant in it – uses metal and found objects to address the lack of a family or personal archive. Inspired by traditional Persian imagery and folklore, Welch creates sculptural works that consider the roles and effects of translation and mythopoeia. 

Chris Ulivo is a fantasist, painting stories that leap out of speculative histories. His earnest –often hapless – surrogates humbly cultivate his egg tempera landscapes to form the essential relationships of their illusory world – we are working together, learning, acting. In these rooted fantasies, he strives “for vitality and believability in each painting no matter how improbable or ridiculous the narrative.”

Old Flames In The Bowers

Track 16 | Downtown LA

Lucky Cat Gallery is proud to present The Wee Show, highlighting small works created by emerging and established LA artists. This is an ideal opportunity for both new collectors and seasoned art lovers to expand their collections. Expect an eclectic mix of paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, and small sculptures. Come join us as we celebrate LA's thriving art community in our final show of the year.

The Wee Show

Lucky Cat Labs

One. 
‍
Entering the space: a transparent barrier splits the room. Its crooked spine braces a clear vertical surface, scratched in with a drawing that only reveals itself in passing light. Collaged paintings straddle both sides, revealing new images as you circle the divide. The materials feel familiar. You catch flashes of them scraping across the city. Wood. Little Trees. Paper. Fingers. Plexiglass. Pigeon. Car part. Egg yolk. Concrete. Bart Simpson. Separate Homer’s skin from his bones. Fry the skin fast, boil the bones slow. Plate together and serve.

A perfect image is destined to fail. An object transcribed by an image is subject to my movement. From far away, the image appears clear. I see two hands, one Toyota. I step closer. Desire accelerates without hope for the future. The image morphs into compression lines encasing blue and green shadows, the paint underneath glowing faintly pink. Restless objects flirt with collision. Cut it out. CUT TO: an eyelash caught in the white of a blinking eye. Hair on the ground, do you miss my scalp? I went to the pet shop and the owner said he had a talking centipede for sale. It gets dark so early now. I took the centipede home. We’re getting close. Close enough.

What is accuracy?

An image of skin doesn’t feel like skin. Bare skin is intimate. Seductive. Its low-resolution image refuses to seduce. Digital artifacts flaunt their lack – lack of information. They deterritorialize. Anonymize. The image provides proximity to intimacy without embodiment. Like sitting in your parked car watching a couple on the street, headlights on and music blaring. Ordinary moments drift towards unprocessed thought. Images stand as thresholds. They provide a liminal portal. Meanwhile, the printer processes new information by repeating the same motion over and over and over.

Two.
‍
Hitachi Magic Wand Original – review by Allison
After the first round of trying this out I’m terrified to do it again. Focusing on finding a release, I did not pay much attention to the heat that was building up, thinking it was just getting a little warm. That is, until I finished and realized how hot the thing had actually gotten. The next day here and I’m feeling just how hot it was against an area of the body that does not take heat like that well. Now I’m realizing that I just dropped $60 on something I’ll likely never use again.

– Jane Shin @strangejane_

Zoe Alameda (b. 2000) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist received her BFA at the University of Southern California in 2023 and attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art residency in 2022. Solo exhibitions include: "It Takes Two Wrongs to Make it Right," Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); "Five Toes Down, with Ashlynn Trane," Lonestar Projects, Los Angeles (2025); "Ode to an Honest Mirror," with Sebastian Loo, curated by Jaustin Tan, Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2024); and "Rest My Head on a Pile of Tacks, USC Gayle and Ed Roski Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). Selected group exhibitions: "Chair Show," AUTOBODY autobody, Los Angeles (2025); "Re|Dacted Lincoln Heights DTLA," Gallery ThirtySix, Los Angeles (2025); "Goodbye Horses," Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York (2025); "Manual Override," Good Mother, Los Angeles (2025); "Cave Dwellers," Stone/Age, Los Angeles (2024); "Beyond the Veil…," Mystery Projects, Los Angeles (2024); "Rules of Engagement," LVL3, Chicago, IL (2024); "Horny Island," Curved Wall Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); "Provócame," curated by Ever Velasquez, Charlie James Gallery, Los  Angeles (2024); "SADECADE," SADE Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); "The Weatherproof Anniversarial," Weatherproof, Chicago (2024); "The Sum of Our Parts," Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn (2024); "NADA New York," Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn (2024); "WIP!," Known Studio, Los Angeles (2024); "Adult Contemporary," curated by @problemchild.advisory, Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); "Material," Wilder, Nashville, TN (2024); "POWER," Transport Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); "SENSES," Mile 44, Los Angeles (2022); "I like what my phone looks like 4 feet away from me," Solo Show (online) (2022); "Nü Moon," New Image Art, Los Angeles (2022); and "blessed curse ii," Solo Show (online) (2022). Curatorial projects include: "Spirit Halloween," organized by Zoe Alameda, Alex Carmen, and Alex Emmons, Lonestar Projects, Los Angeles (2024); "Me and You and Me and," organized by Zoe Alameda, Alex Carmen, Roma Edwards, Ashylnn Smith, Kayli Temple, and Gabriel Tolson, SADE Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); "Three Point Turn," organized by Alex Carmen and Zoe Alameda, Lonestar Projects, Los Angeles (2023); "Five Leaf Clover," New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); "Other," USC Gayle and Ed Roski Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); and "Cut My Ankle Open, Just a Little Bit," organized by Zoe Alameda and Alex Carmen, Los Angeles (2021).

Image: Installation view of Zoe Alameda: It Takes Two Wrongs To Make It Right at Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025-26). Courtesy of the artist and Cheremoya, Los Angeles.

Zoe Alameda: It Takes Two Wrongs To Make It Right

Cheremoya

ReflectSpace is pleased to present a solo exhibition of first-generation Colombian-American artist Carolyn Castaño. 

Born, raised, and educated in California, Castaño’s work reflects her experience as the daughter of immigrants—iterative, interdisciplinary—moving drawings and paintings from the two-dimensional flatness of paper or canvas to digitally printed fabric, to videos that incorporate animated drawings, to furniture pieces, to nail decals featured within the larger context of a video. 

In “Viajero del Tiempo/Time Traveler,” Castaño draws on her late father’s photographic archive—comprising 4,000 photographs, films, and videos—to consider the fragility and ephemerality of memory and identity. The pictures in the exhibition are juxtaposed next to drawings of the landscape (inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s landscapes and botanical studies) to consider how the land figures in the trajectory and memory of the migrant/immigrant.  

Complementing Castaño’s work, the PassageWay features photographs by young women from the Las Fotos Project, an organization that elevates the voices of teenage girls and gender-expansive youth from communities of color through photography and mentoring. 

“Viajero del Tiempo/Time Traveler” is curated by Ara and Anahid Oshagan. 

PARKING
3 Hours of free parking is available with library validation at the Marketplace parking structure across the street from the Harvard Street entrance of Glendale Central Library. Accessible parking is available on the east side of the building. View the Visit page for public transit information.

Image: Carolyn Castaño, Composite image: “Father Standing Over Hollywood Fwy,” Inkjet print reproduction, 1961 / “Mantel,” Mixed media on canvas, variable dimensions, 2020-2022 


Carolyn Castaño: Viajero del Tiempo/Time Traveler

ReflectSpace

Mother Tongue asks: “What does it mean to speak the language of power?” In this moment, more than ever, words matter. Words seduce. Words distort. Words unite. Words intoxicate. Power knows this well, with language as its chosen lover.

Friday Gallery’s fall season brings together diaspora and indigenous artists exploring the language and symbols of power, from the literal to the metaphoric and mythic. Mother Tongue presents works by Caroline Monnet, Raymundo T. Reynoso, Cryptik, Salomón Huerta, and Behnaz Farahi. Weaving perspectives from Anishinaabe, Mexican, South Korean, and Iranian heritages, the pieces tell a larger story of how language and power have always danced together across time, culture, and community.

The show will be paired with a living library: 100 Books of Resistance chosen by 100 cultural thinkers and curated by linguist scholar Eva Barbarossa. The Mother Tongue library and popup bookstore will bring together diverse views on power and language: from the conversations of plants, to the secret lexicon of an extinct female-only language. It will span cultures, eras, and genres: from protest poetry to con artists, from political philosophy to comic books.

Your mother tongue is the first language you learned to speak. By understanding the language of power and making it our native tongue, we can hold it, bend it, and channel it as our own. Mother Tongue is a love letter to the thinkers, writers, and artists who’ve given us the language of courage when we needed it most.

___

With fashion by King Kennedy and Qasimi, silkscreen bandanas by Eduardo Raul Muñoz-Villafaña, sign-painted wooden matchboxes from Maachis, and hats from Ambos Project.

___

FRIDAY GALLERY

For the Browns, the Queers, and the Witches. Friday exists to enable the discovery of rising creative voices from the Global South, curating art, objects, and editions from the Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, and beyond. Our space blends an art gallery with a design concept store to create a seasonal platform anchored in a rotating theme, with the art, fashion, and object curation bound together in a shared spirit. From Pakistani minimalism, to the surrealist visions of feminist Dubai photographers, to queer gothic brujas in Mexico, we peel back old divides to celebrate the cultural voices of tomorrow.



MOTHER TONGUE: On Power

Friday Gallery

Dario Argento, Antonin Artaud, Oliver Bak, Bruce Conner, Mati Diop & Fatima Al Qadiri, Cyprien Gaillard, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Asger Jorn, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Harmony Korine, Tetsumi Kudo, Mire Lee, Diego Marcon, Tyler Mitchell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jill Mulleady, Precious Okoyomon, Sondra Perry, Carol Rama, Cindy Sherman, Pol Taburet, Henry Taylor, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Andra Ursuta, Kara Walker and Jordan Wolfson

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Horror, a group exhibition organized by Jill Mulleady featuring an intergenerational group of artists. The exhibition presents horror as both symptom and strategy, illuminating seen and unseen forces that inscribe themselves on human experience. Rooted in the shadows of trauma, repression, and social unrest, horror channels our deepest anxieties and weaves fictions that probe the intersection of societal collapse and psychological unease. Whether evoking Cold War paranoia, civil rights conflicts, radiation fears, surveillance anxieties, or the existential dread and hyperreality of our times, the works in the exhibition quietly surface the intimate, often suppressed tensions embedded within collective and individual realities. Here, horror is neither simply spectacle nor genre, but rather a potent aesthetic and psychological resource—a visceral means of navigating the contradictions that define our era.

Horror

Sprüth Magers

Night Gallery presents YOU CAN HATE ME NOW, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack. The exhibition combines assemblage, printmaking, performance, and installation to examine questions of endurance, spirituality, and survival in contemporary American life. This is Gaitor-Lomack's second solo presentation with the gallery.

Through work that holds ancestral memory and contemporary social critique in productive tension, Gaitor-Lomack's practice challenges established hierarchies and institutional frameworks. Drawing on Fred Moten's concept of "fugitive planning and Black study," his art functions as both communion and inquiry within a language of rebellion, faith, and perseverance. His installations incorporate unconventional materials such as ice pops, dodgeballs, toilet paper, stone, wood, and soil. Like the Arte Povera artists, Gaitor-Lomack finds significance in humble materials, creating work where spiritual concerns meet architectural form.

Growing up in Neptune, New Jersey—a coastal town named for the Roman god of the sea—Gaitor-Lomack developed an early relationship with the Atlantic Ocean that continues to inform his sensibility. The water offered what he describes as an education in perception, teaching him to understand art as something in motion rather than static. The ocean's particular quality of being simultaneously vast and intimate remains central to his practice.

The influence of the ocean carries into Los Angeles, where Gaitor-Lomack has lived and worked for over 12 years. The city's rhythms and contradictions filter into his recent body of work: fire truck sirens punctuate afternoon tea ceremonies, the scent of dried flowers mixes with urban exhaust, children play against the San Gabriel Mountains, and street vendors call out their wares. Meanwhile, ICE raids loom, and the hum of addiction drifts through it all. Displacement abuts resilience, transposing Los Angeles' complexities into compositions that insist on visibility and care.

One such work is Only Way Up, 2025, a large-scale installation that repurposes a turn-of-the-century gold birdcage elevator salvaged from a historic hotel. Activated through movement during opening night, the piece represents what Gaitor-Lomack calls "conceptual performance assemblage"—an exploration of sculpture and endurance. Nearby, Triple Beam Dreams, 2025, transforms a child's bunk bed through layers of mesh and found materials, moving between registers of innocence and survival. Together, these works map the economic and spiritual networks that shape the artist's surrounding community.

Also included in the exhibition are works from his ongoing series Dodge The System, 4EVER and Guardians of the Afro Fantasy. In Dodge The System, 4EVER, Gaitor-Lomack connects protest and printmaking as continuous forms of expression, engaging with scholar Kellie Jones's understanding of ritual as a mode of resistance. Guardians of the Afro Fantasy examines Black presence across centuries through found materials reimagined as carriers of memory and myth. Everyday ephemera takes on the weight of classical sculpture, invoking Greek and Roman iconography while asserting Black divinity and authority.

Gaitor-Lomack's artistic formation reflects his movement between coasts. From New York’s legacies of conceptual art, hip-hop culture, and performance, he draws structure and lyricism. From Los Angeles, he inherits humor, material insight, and the poetics of endurance inspired by the spiritual work of West Coast artists such as Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, and John Outterbridge. Between these bicoastal influences, Gaitor-Lomack has developed a visual language that operates in a realm marked by protest and prophecy. YOU CAN HATE ME NOW is a bridge between cultures, one that stretches across this unprecedentedly complicated moment in United States history.

Image: Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, A Chair for A Powerful Curator, 2025, reclaimed wood chair, nails, burlap, and balloon, 60 x 160 x 36 in (152.4 x 406.4 x 91.4 cm)

_____

Here’s just a few great paint slingers: Delacroix, Neel, Auerbach, Van Gogh, Grotjahn, Cecily, Hockney, Henry, Freud, Peyton, Ryman, Hals, Schutz, Schnabs, Lisa Y,  Monet, Manet. And yeah, I’m gonna go there and toss in Woll.

Starting in 2016, I lived with a Mt. Wilson painting of Andy’s because I was drawn to the seriousness of the play in the various yellows in the palette and the way the paint was pushed around with a quiet athleticism, an intuitive confidence. It’s that stroke, coupled with a deep understanding of color, that I’ve seen over and over in the paint slingers. It’s never the same way of course, authorship right, but always laid down with a knowing hand. Can be sharp, slashing, hard, can be fluid, lyrical, loose. And everything in between. He had a way to go then, but I saw the beginnings of something there, in the passages, percolating, stewing. It took a decade but what’s now here, before you, is a revelation.

We all have a voice inside that doesn’t make a sound but we listen to, that wonderfully meddlesome root down there that will burrow toward an idea, maybe take hold and guide us to the precipice, point us toward the leap, that place of the new, if you want it. There is no easy way when going there. Change. Process. Shift. Yeah, the mountain stroke is still there: in the corners, in the clothes, behind them. And there’s a few Wilsons hanging. But the artist is mostly melting away from the mountain as a ground to the abstract by bringing in the figure, the music now single notes not just chords. And with this new album of quintessence on the walls, Andy has done something calm and wild: Paintings showing thought.

Andy told me he doesn’t cry much but he said when these paintings leave the studio, he will tear up. I can see why; after so much intimacy with these souls, he’s brought his own tender energy and fallen in love with these people. He didn’t just create these paintings; he’s magically conjured a new kind of presence. You can sense them in their own personal abstraction. No, these are not simply paintings, they are spirits.

Portraits have been painted forfuckingever. But look, everyone up there isn’t just a representation of a person, these depictions are living, breathing, present. Except for the self-portrait, no one is looking at us, these are people contained in consciousness and dreams. They are grounded, lovingly captured in warm oils forever with an uncanniness and curiosity that is extraordinary and wonderful. Profound because they are not just flesh made into paintings but paintings of people alive and rendered in deliberate intense strokes that guide us to feel they are here in their thoughts, reflections, inside.

These are little miracles. And yes, in painting, this is what transcendence looks like.


-Jeff Poe

 

Night Gallery is pleased to present New Objectivity, an exhibition of new paintings by Andy Woll. This marks the artist's fourth solo presentation with the gallery. 

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack: YOU CAN HATE ME NOW | Andy Woll: New Objectivity

Night Gallery North

Made in L.A. 2025 is the seventh iteration of the Hammer’s signature biennial exhibition that showcases artists practicing throughout the greater Los Angeles area. The 28 participants in the exhibition present work not only made in the city but also grounded in its complex and unfolding terrain. Neither myth nor monolith, Los Angeles is many things to many people, and its dissonance is perhaps its most distinguishing feature. The works presented in this year’s biennial include film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. Attitude draws them together: Each engages with this city in ways alternately literal, formal, material, and metaphoric. Conceived or made in Los Angeles, they are of this city and nowhere else.

The Artists
David Alekhuogie 	
Pat O’Neill
Black House Radio / Michael Donte	
Will Rawls
Greg Breda	
Brian Rochefort
Widline Cadet	
Amanda Ross-Ho
Carl Cheng	
Gabriela Ruiz 
Alonzo Davis	
Alake Shilling 
Ali Eyal	
Nicole-Antonia Spagnola
Hood Century / Jerald Cooper	
Mike Stoltz 
Hanna Hur	
Peter Tomka
John Knight	
Freddy Villalobos
Kristy Luck	
Kelly Wall
Patrick Martinez	
Leilah Weinraub
Beaux Mendes	
Bruce Yonemoto
Na Mira	 
New Theater Hollywood / Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel	
 
Made in L.A. 2025 is organized by Essence Harden, independent curator, and Paulina Pobocha, Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and former Hammer Museum Robert Soros Senior Curator, with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow, curatorial assistant.

The exhibition is made possible by the Mohn Family Foundation and members of the Hammer Circle. Major support is provided by The Billy and Audrey L. Wilder Foundation, Miky Lee, and Mark Sandelson. Generous support is provided by The Fran and Ray Stark Foundation; Bill Hair; Susan Genco and Mitch Kamin; J.P. Morgan; Dori Peterman Mostov and Charles Mostov; and Orange Barrel Media. Additional support is provided by The Buddy Taub Foundation, Dennis A. Roach and Stephanie Roach, Directors; McCrea Foundation; Sherry and Joel McKuin; the Pasadena Art Alliance; The Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation and Jonathan Segal; and Michael Silver.

Made in L.A. 2025

Hammer Museum

The Catalina Museum of Art & History is proud to present From Los Angeles to Catalina: The Art of Sonia Romero, an intimate and visually striking exhibition by celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Sonia Romero. On view until March 15, 2026, the exhibition features a curated selection of Romero’s iconic silkscreen prints, paintings and a brand-new site-specific work that captures the nostalgic charm and layered cultural history of Catalina Island.

Romero, widely recognized for her intricate paper-cutting, printmaking and mixed-media paintings, spent the summer of 2024 in Avalon researching and connecting with the local community. Her time on the island included leading museum-hosted workshops and exploring the museum’s vast archive of vintage Catalina ephemera—from postcards to brochures and ticket stubs—gathering visual references and historical insight for this new body of work.

“I’ve always been fascinated by vintage graphics and ephemera,” says Romero. “I spent two whole days poring over old postcards, brochures and ticket stubs. It’s a wonderful way to understand how the story of Catalina has been told over the years.”

Deeply rooted in Chicano culture and shaped by the diverse landscapes of California, Romero’s work explores themes of identity, community and the human connection to place. This exhibition marks the beginning of her ongoing exploration of Catalina Island,a journey sparked by her first visit to the island at age 14. With early sketches and plans for future works already underway, Romero intends to return to Avalon to continue expanding this evolving series.

“This is a deeply personal project for me,” she shares. “The island’s mix of glamour, grit and history resonates with the way I tell stories through my art. This is only the beginning.”

From Los Angeles to Catalina: The Art of Sonia Romero

Catalina Museum for Art & History

This fall, The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date, on view November 22, 2025 to April 5, 2026. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad 

The Sextant, an immersive installation by Enrique Martínez Celaya, will open at The Wende Museum on November 8, 2025. This is the first solo exhibition in the museum’s history.

The Sextant is conceived as a visual poem, comprising the reconstructed childhood home and the sculptures and paintings within, all held together by a single material: sugar. The installation also includes larger paintings and working machinery that continually restore the sugar. The original house on which the work is based was built by the artist’s father in the sugarcane town of Nueva
Paz, Cuba, between 1957 and 1963, at the height of the Cold War.

This installation concludes the artist’s trilogy on Cuba, which began with Los muertos llaman al alba at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana and The Word-Shimmering Sea: Diego Velázquez / Enrique Martínez Celaya at The Hispanic Society in New York, both presented in 2024. The Sextant continues Martínez Celaya’s inquiry into memory and belonging, into how the self is refracted through the notion of home and the bond between witness and participant, placing the personal and the political in close proximity.

Supported by The Wende Museum’s commitment to preserving and interpreting Cold War history through its collections of art, artifacts, and archives, this final part of the trilogy draws resonance from the museum’s holdings and their alignment with the installation’s themes of memory, ideology, and reconstruction.


Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant

The Wende Museum

The Blue Forest is an immersive installation by Marine Scientist and Artist Oriana Poindexter that transports visitors into the underwater world of Catalina Island’s iconic kelp forests without ever getting wet.

“Oriana’s work embodies our mission to celebrate the unique art, history and environment of Catalina,” said Sheila Bergman, Executive Director of Catalina Museum for Art & History. “The Blue Forest allows visitors to connect with the island’s natural world in a way that is as visually stunning as it is deeply meaningful.”

Created by hand using historic photographic processes, The Blue Forest features life-size cyanotype images of native marine flora,  collected by Poindexter while freediving just off Catalina’s shoreline and contact printed onto flowing silk panels. Visitors are invited to wander through a labyrinth of luminous, ocean-blue silk that depicts giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), elk kelp (Pelagophycus porra) and other local species.

Both meditative and educational, the exhibition bridges art, science and sensory experience. As light filters through the translucent panels, visitors are immersed in an environment that evokes the beauty and biodiversity of the island’s underwater ecosystems. For the first time in her work, Poindexter incorporates an underwater soundscape built from her own ocean recordings, deepening the sense of being submerged.

“I hope visitors will feel the sense of calm, curiosity and connection that I experience underwater,” said Oriana Poindexter. “Entering the forest of cyanotype silks is an invitation to slow down, breathe, and recognize yourself as a small part of something much larger. The exhibit is designed to act as a portal into Catalina’s underwater world, offering an encounter that is at once intimate, meditative, and educational.”

The Blue Forest: An Immersive Installation by Marine Scientist and Artist Oriana Poindexter

Opening and artist talk: September 13, 6 PM - 9 PM

For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Guadalupe Maravilla transforms REDCAT into an environment for healing and storytelling. Born in El Salvador, Maravilla fled the country at the age of eight as an unaccompanied minor to escape the violence of the twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War, reuniting with his family in the United States. As an adult, the artist survived cancer, a disease he believes resulted from the childhood traumas of war, migration, exile, and living in the US undocumented. Throughout this new exhibition, Maravilla retraces his personal journey as a migrant while connecting it with the journeys of others, offering a site for ancestral healing and collective care.

This exhibition is curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs.



Guadalupe Maravilla: Les soñadores

REDCAT

Gemini G.E.L., the artists’ workshop and publisher, is pleased to announce two landmark exhibitions honoring the Centennial of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Robert Rauschenberg at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration highlights the artist’s remarkable relationship with Gemini. Opening at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles on September 15 with a reception on September 20, 2025, the exhibition showcases iconic works that redefined the possibilities of printmaking.

The works presented in this celebration feel like a journey—not just through the artist’s four decades at Gemini G.E.L., but through the restless, searching spirit that defined him. From the moment he stepped into the workshop in 1967, Rauschenberg seemed to expand the very idea of what printmaking could hold—folding in the unexpected, the ordinary, the cosmic, and the deeply personal. This exhibition is as much about his vision as it is about the alchemy of collaboration: the way paper, ink, fabric, light, and found matter can become something alive, something that still speaks to us decades later.

Robert Rauschenberg: Celebrating Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration

Gemini G.E.L

Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present Christine Frerichs: Recent Paintings - the gallery’s first solo exhibition of paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist.  The exhibition opens with a reception on November 15th and continues through December 20th.

Christine Frerichs creates intimate observational paintings of interior scenes in her home and studio.  Each painting in the series is created over days, weeks, or even months - her easel remains in place as daily life ebbs and flows around  it.  The compositions evolve as the space changes over time: glasses are placed on a bedside table, the sheets get rumpled by her partner’s nap, a plant sprouts and wilts, papers stack up on a counter.  The paintings are a form of self-portraiture - a portrait not as she sees herself but as if we are looking through her eyes at her sense of self reflected in the surroundings.

Time is an ever present component of the paintings - be it the changing light over day or weeks, or the accumulation of objects on a table, or that we step backwards and forward in a hallway with the artist.  Frerichs came out as gay at age 40 and the necessity and importance of change is a thread that weaves through the work.  These are process paintings - they are about the time spent in contemplation and the search for meaning in the intimacies of daily life: potting plants, a bedroom corner, the hallway depicted as many times as it is walked through in a day. 

Our lives are built and lived in our personal spaces and, like our lives and our selves, they change bit by bit over time.  The spider plant in the corner takes on a persona - it flourishes and wilts and flourishes again in an unexplained trajectory - are we watching the plant grow?  Or are we watching it languish?  Frerichs doesn’t present the viewer with a chronology to the series - she presents moments and the viewer’s own personal experience creates a narrative.

Frerichs’ paintings are exquisitely rendered in oil on wax coated paper, linen and canvas. The wax ground, applied hot, gives the paintings a muted luminosity that is like no other.  The oil over wax has a flow and movement that is subtle and distinctive - detailed but not and imperfectly perfect.  Her color palette is soft - as if time as rubbed off the sharpness and left a comfortable calm.  Even the edge of the paintings, where Frerichs intentionally allows the build up of layers to be visible, speak to a cumulus of histories. 

Our personal spaces are a reflection of ourselves - a physical manifestation of our routines and patterns. Our lives repeat day after day with subtle shifts.  Sometimes those shifts are imperceptible until we find ourselves later looking back and realizing how far we’ve come.  Frerichs is asking us to look, to see, to pause, and to understand that change comes slowly but that the wonder and beauty of life is in the never-ending evolution of the self.

Christine Frerichs (b. 1979 in Los Angeles, CA) received her BFA from the University of Arizona (Tucson) in 2002 and her MFA from University of California (Riverside) in 2009.  Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including in Los Angeles, New York, and Tucson.  She has been the recipient of the Painting’s Edge Residency and Fellowship, a Change Inc. Artist Grant, and the Maxwell H. Gluck Fellowship.  Her work as been published in Artforum, art ltd., ARTPULSE, the Los Angeles Times, Two Coast of Paint, and New American Paintings, among others.  She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at East Los Angeles College.  Frerichs lives and works in Los Angeles.


Christine Frerichs: Recent Paintings

Billis Williams Gallery

Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce It’s Crossed My Mind, a group exhibition featuring the work of Andrea Chung, Henri Paul Broyard, Jessica Palermo, Pau S. Pescador, and Samantha Roth. The exhibition will be on view from November 22 – December 20, 2025, with a reception on Saturday, December 13, from 4–6pm.

It’s Crossed My Mind brings together works that meditate on memory, its fragility, persistence, and the ways it shapes both personal and collective experience. Drawing from a selection of gallery artists and recent programming, the exhibition traces how recollection surfaces in material, gesture, history, and narrative form.

Several artists approach memory through deeply personal lenses. Samantha Roth’s Memory Jogging unfolds as a tactile investigation of recall, where the drawing’s layered surfaces mirror the instability and uncanny edges of memory loss. Jessica Palermo’s painting depicts a figure encountering an orthopedic mold of her son’s teeth, suspending the moment between dream and waking, and capturing the disorientation of encountering an object charged with emotional history. Henri Paul Broyard’s painting of a retro 1990s television is pulled from the artist’s own childhood that transforms a familiar domestic object into a site of longing, nostalgia, and early self-formation.

Other works engage memory through historical and social narratives. Such as Andrea Chung’s Made Whole sculpture, composed of cast paper-pulp hands modeled after midwives' hands, speaks to ancestral lineage, colonialism, and labor taken from stories passed down by her own grandmother, who was a midwife in Trinidad. Pau S. Pescador’s collages examine the lives of trans individuals employed in the civil service sector, illuminating stories and memories often overlooked, particularly at a moment when legal protections remain contested and precarious.

Together, these works create a landscape of psychological and emotional depth, one in which memory is not a fixed archive but an active, shifting terrain. It’s Crossed My Mind offers introspective entry points that open just enough for viewers to step into, inviting them to consider how memory operates within their own lived experience.

It's Crossed My Mind

Tyler Park Presents



Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present FRED STONEHOUSE: BUST the gallery’s second solo exhibition of paintings by the Wisconsin-based artist.  The exhibition opens with a reception on November 15th and continues through December 20th.

Fred Stonehouse is well known for his darkly whimsical compositions with humorous and sometimes cutting bits of text.  In this new series, aptly titled Bust, Stonehouse is exploring portraiture featuring only the head and shoulders (a bust) as well as the parallel meaning of ‘to cause a collapse or to lose everything’ (to go bust, busted). 

Bust explores a talismanic presence - a mysterious personal totem or spirit figure in both human and animal form.  Stonehouse describes the source of these figures as dreams in which he “sense[s] a figure or presence that is lurking just out of sight, maybe somewhere just behind […], down very low or looming above.”  In these paintings, it is as if the artist is rendering each facet of his fears and hopes and dreams and worries.  The paintings speak to the confusion and the illogical nature of dreams - the topsy-turvy unsettled feeling when you wake up from a particularly intense session of REM.  Stonehouse oscillates between including and not including text in his work.  In the paintings where it is included, the chaos is contained by the words - the artist is able to decipher the message while in others with no text, the chaos looms large and we experience along with the artist that unexplainable feeling of waking from a dream with intensely illogical emotions that we sense deeply as truth.  

From a formal standpoint, the head and shoulders format provides Stonehouse a structure within which to explore color, symmetry, and pattern.  The tension between ornamental flatness and naturalistic volume in these works has pushed Stonehouse’s practice into new visual terrain.  Weaving garish color, unnatural facial features, and non-human forms, these paintings play with the grotesque and its function in questioning cultural systems through the distortion of classical ideas of harmony and the inversion of norms (Astruc). 

Deeply symbolic and laden with meaning, Stonehouse’s paintings depict archetypes and then skewer them and in so doing, undermine the dominant narratives that don’t serve us well.  By bringing them out of the shadows and laying them bare in the light of day, we are forced to look.  These highly personal dream forces, be they demons or imps or angels or gurus, are deep parts of our psyches and can be powerful guides in our lives.  Many of the these characters feel very personal but others feel like frightening statements about where we are as a society.  There is a universal in the personal and by cataloging and naming that which we fear, we as collective humanity can move forward with greater awareness.

Fred Stonehouse (b.1960, Milwaukee, WI) received his BFA from UW Milwaukee in 1982. He had his first solo show in Chicago in 1983 and has exhibited widely throughout the United States as well as in Mexico, Amsterdam, Rome, and Berlin.  His work is included in numerous private collections as well as in the public collections of the Block Museum (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL), Chazen Museum of Art (University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI), Haggerty Museum of Art (Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI), Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), San Jose Art Museum (San Jose, CA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), and the University of Arizona Art Museum (Tucson, AZ).  Stonehouse was the recipient of an NEA Arts Midwest Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Individual Artists Grant. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Wisconsin.


Fred Stonehouse: Bust

Solo exhibition of new paintings by Christian Vincent. FINAL SPY SHOW

Christian Vincent: ABOUT FACE

SPY Projects

An engine beats like a heart, or maybe a heart purrs like an engine. Under the hood, an organ, a pit, perhaps a pearl. Crack open a piece of fruit like a geode and find it cavernous, rotting and iridescent. Laden with a bowling ball, a token of love is too heavy to lift, let alone carry into eternity. Somewhere soft to dream or toss and turn becomes a landscape of jewels, an archway, a slice of bread made inedible by mold or scalding heat. Material, shape, symbol, image—nothing is too solid to destabilize. In her sculptures, Kathleen Ryan pulls everyday objects to the brink of uncanniness, revealing new formal and associative possibilities in turn. Following her first institutional survey at Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kistefos Museum, the nine sculptures in Souvenir present a cross-section of the motifs, techniques, and conceptual decisions integral to Ryan’s entire practice. Desire, novelty, childhood, fantasy, love, and death—the blood and guts of life—are in play here, recast in familiar forms that both are and are not what they seem.

Souvenir debuts two new bodies of work. The first is a trio of cast-concrete peaches, their pits supplanted by engines. Their polished interiors and unfinished exteriors evoke the contrasting textures of the fruit’s flesh and skin. Heartthrob (all works 2025) is a Ford F-150’s powertrain embedded in a two-ton slice of solid concrete. Partially submerged tangles of wires, rusting cylinders and pistons, and other truck innards feed into its belly like arteries. Heartbreaker and Wild Heart iterate on the same sculptural logic. The latter’s sleek, half-exposed core is culled from a Harley Davidson, its twin cylinders echoing the two-sided structure of that titular organ. These sculptures could be alien or primordial, but their most visceral resemblance is to the human body—itself linked to automobiles through both language (valves, chambers, and so on) and, as Ryan reminds us, form. The peaches’ curves and dimples are stylized, “more emoji than produce aisle,” per the artist. But, as these sculptures attest, symbols drag their previous contexts along with them as they shapeshift. Heartbreaker, Heartthrob, and Wild Heart pulse with all of these intertwined valences: organ, body, car, fruit, pixelated and pop cultural symbols of desire.

The heart reappears in the second new series in Souvenir: a quartet of rings, versions of the plastic-and-rhinestone variety a child might bring home from a princess-themed party. Their bands, scaled to a waist rather than a finger, retain the seam (known as a “parting line”) and adjustable split of their mass-produced originals. Soda cans cast in iron or aluminum comprise the rings’ studded halo settings, which encircle gems made of candy-colored bowling balls and faceted glass. Jewelry as form and symbolically loaded object is one of Ryan’s longtime motifs. As in previous works, here she teases out jewelry’s sentimental values—as stand-ins for devotion, taste, or generational ties—and upends them through plays of scale and material. Show Pony, Heavy Heart, and Sweet Nothings chart desire lines from adult declarations of love back to the sparkling objects that first teach us how to want. These rings hold nostalgic weight in addition to their literal heft. Heavy associations multiply: an albatross for your finger, my love?

At the heart of the exhibition is Dreamhouse, a rotting raspberry roughly the size of a minivan. This is the first fruit of its kind in the series for which Ryan is perhaps best known; the Bad Fruit sculptures epitomize the subversive play with material that is the crux of her artistic project. The raspberry’s magenta flesh is composed of a gridlike expanse of plastic beads. The foil to this neat formalism is the mold, ornately rendered in gemstones in a contrasting palette such as lapis lazuli, malachite, and turquoise. Inside the sculpture’s yawning mouth is a glittering interior dripping with stalactites and stalagmites: within this berry is a crystal cave. This transfiguration brings a host of new potential associations—prehistoric, allegorical, and psychoanalytic, to name a few. As she has noted, her large-scale sculptures have an affinity with roadside attractions; the works’ otherworldly proportions also imply a tumble down the proverbial rabbit hole (“EAT ME” is a trick, here, too)—Dreamhouse in particular appears to have been cultivated in an enchanted world. Made over the course of three years, this sculpture draws on multiple fantasies: the decadent home of one’s dreams; Barbie’s plastic monument to an idea of female autonomy; and the cavernous subconscious, visited in sleep and and host to our deepest desires.

Sunset Strip and Starstruck, too, are rendered in Ryan’s signature tapestry of stones and beads, their spangled arrangement mapping states of decay. But this duo is not fruit: the sculptures register simultaneously as King-sized mattresses and massive slices of pillowy white bread. Their planar surfaces also flirt with painterly language: the crusts double as keyhole arches or windows, framing vistas of the skies at different hours. Sunset Strip’s crystalline mold blooms like clouds flushed by fading light, as seductively composed as a Hollywood backdrop. Toast blackened to a crisp at first glance, Starstruck is also a nocturne, the mantle of agate, amber, and so-called “fool’s gold” among other materials coalescing into a midnight sky. Even as Ryan cultivates these lofty associations (the history of painting, architecture, the heavens) she grounds her sculptures in the mundane. Installed leaning against the wall, Sunset Strip and Starstruck evoke domestic discards, beds propped against a lamppost or slouching over a curb awaiting a ride to oblivion. “I’m not trying to depict things as they actually are,” Ryan has said. Yet for all their metamorphosis, her sculptures present a vision of reality that is all the more vivid for the complexity it reveals.

Kathleen: Ryan Souvenir

Karma Los Angeles 

Patricia Fernández (b. 1980, Burgos; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2010) and a BFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2002). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2024, 2021, 2018); Commonwealth and Council, Mexico City (2023); Whistle, Seoul (2021); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2021, 2016); Holiday Forever, Jackson Hole (2020); Todd Madigan Gallery, Bakersfield (2018); Museo de Arte Burgos (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and LAXART (2014). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2023, 2017); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Obra, Malmö (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Fernández is a recipient of Otis College of Art and Design Faculty Development Grant (2025, 2021), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2017-18), Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowship (2015), France-Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2011). Fernández has participated in residencies at Sandness, Norway (2024), Forest Island, Mammoth Lakes (2018); Récollets, Paris (2016); D-Flat, Mexico City (2016); Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2013).

_____

An nochipa tlaltikpak:

san achika ya nikan.

Tel ka chalchiuitl no xamani,

no teokuitloatl in tlapani,

No ketsali posteki.

An nochipa tlaltikpak:

san achika ye nikan.

—Netzahualcoyotl

Everything is in a process of transformation: flowing, moving, changing, and falling apart. In 4 Meters, Beatriz Cortez regards the sinking of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City as a metaphor for impermanence. The surrounding Lake Texcoco aids this transformation, resisting the cultural occupation of the Palacio—the ultimate symbol of modernity—and measuring time by the increasing depth of the spoils of colonialism it drowns. Like a cenote, the lake swallows offerings, enabling the survival of the Indigenous cultures and spirituality of the ancient urban center that once occupied this site. Evoking the words of the poet ruler of Texcoco, Netzahualcoyotl, Cortez reminds us that everything crumbles: “Not forever on Earth: only fleetingly here. Even if made of jade it breaks, even if made of precious metal it cracks, even if made of quetzal feathers it tears. Not forever on Earth: only fleetingly here.”

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles and Davis) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2015) and a PhD in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University (1999). Cortez is faculty at University of California, Davis. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at Americas Society, New York (2025); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor (2023); Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown (2023); Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2021). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2025); Boston Public Art Triennial (2025); Kemper Museum of Art, St. Louis (2025); Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga (2024); 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford (2022); Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, East Lansing (2021); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panama (2021); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2020). Cortez is a recipient of Latinx Arts Fellowship, Mellon Foundation (2023), New School Vera List Center Borderlands Fellowship (2022–24), and Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020). Cortez has participated in residencies at Ucross Foundation (2025); The Arctic Circle (2023); and Atelier Calder, Saché (2022).

Cortez’s work is in the collections of El Paso Museum of Art; Ford Foundation, New York; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Lawrence University, Appleton; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA (MAC3); Museo Comunitario Kaqjay, Patzicía; and Museo de la Imagen y la Palabra, San Salvador.

_____

Dala Nasser (b. 1990, Tyre; lives and works in Beirut and London) received an MFA from Yale University (2021) and a BFA from University College London (2016). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Kunsthalle Basel (2025); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2023); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2022); and V.O Curations, London (2022). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Aichi Triennale, Nagoya (2025); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2025); Accelerator, Stockholm (2025); Wellcome Collection, London (2025); Espoo Museum of Art, Helsinki (2025); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riiyadh (2024); 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023); 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); and Beirut Art Center (2019). Nassar is a recipient of Isola Sicilia Prize (2022) and 32nd Salon D’Automne Emerging Artist Prize (2017). Nassar has participated in residencies at V.O Curations, London (2021); Gapado AIR, Jeju Island (2019); and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2017).

Nasser’s work is in the collections of Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Qatar Museums; and Tate, London.

Image: Beatriz Cortez

Secret Asian Man presents: Three Voices Patricia Fernández | Beatriz Cortez: 4 Meters | Dala Nasser: Innocents at Home 

Commonwealth and Council

Nothing’s True Forever, a two-person exhibition featuring the multidisciplinary practices of Jon Pylypchuk and Reinhart Revilla Selvik, is an exploration of the embodied architectures around memory (individual and collective), loss, and the collapsing into identity. 

Memory is beyond the individual — when bodies and consciousness are entangled into the fabric of a city and each other — memory moves through the passenger, through things, a magnetism of unfinished feeling, a shared ache that demands witness. In this exhibition, Pylypchuk and Selvik’s works build a landscape where individual memories, reworked and coalesced, are entangled in playful relationships of witnessing. 

There are events that arrive too soon to be felt, and so they live on, not in time, but in the trembling between moments–that slippery space between the action of daily consciousness. With the paradox of loss (of a person, place, or thing), meaning remains (in the shadow of what was) even when that thing is absent. The past leans forward, pressing against the present, an imprint pressed into the surface. 

In Selvik’s practice, the memory returns with its own agency, an insistence that resists translation. Built and discovered as an accumulation of embodied gestures on the surface of the painting, remembrance and allegory take shape into a recognizable architecture, often dramatic scores of lived reality. Power dynamics and tender memories are conveyed within active relationships at the intersection of the individual and community. His multi-disciplinary process remains grounded in site-specific explorations of urban landscapes, especially those rooted in peripheral perspectives. The tension between the vast scale of a city can exist within the soft space of a mind. What happens when a place of memory no longer exists in a physical location? 

When nothing is lost, everything is transformed. This building phrase consoles in the context of mourning and grief in Pylypchuk’s work. What disappears from our plane only shifts form, energy, and presence. Memory is the medium of that transformation contained within the physical boundaries of simple materials (a purse, a bowling ball, buckets, polyurethane foam, etc.) that Pylypchuk assembles into choreographies of figuration. Jon suggests a moment where loss continues to be woven into the fabric of becoming, echoing, and haunting yet ever watching the story unfold. Often, his characters draw upon the animal world to explore the frailty of human existence and social relationships, in this case everyday objects are anthropomorphized trusting their existence among ours.

Pylypchuk and Selvik's works encode the visual and psychological imprints of the modern metropolis—its fleeting moments, its persistent echoes — present and pervasive, while sometimes ignored. Nothing’s True Forever, interfolds the essence of each artist's practice, manifesting the signature of consciousness into the humorous, livable, and ultimately tangible. 

Jon Pylypchuk and Reinhart Revilla Selvik: Nothing's True Forever

Dmst Atelier

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Ken Gonzales-Day: Afterlife,  the artist’s sixth solo exhibition, on view in Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 from November 8 through December 20, 2025. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, November 8, from 4:00 to 7:00 pm. 

Known for his conceptually driven photography and his investigations into race and historical memory, Gonzales-Day presents a new body of work that underscores the vital role of museum collections in celebrating the breadth of human experience. Drawing on his own cultural influences, he brings together objects from the Mexica and broader Mesoamerican traditions with those from Europe, Africa and Asia, foregrounding his intersectional perspective as a Queer Latinx artist. The exhibition's title, Afterlife, evokes the enduring afterlife of cultural objects, as both artistic expressions and historical artifacts within a larger cultural framework, while challenging the traditional narratives presented in museums. 

Over the past 20 years, Gonzales-Day has photographed objects in museum collections and digitally reassembled them into new works. By combining these objects, Gonzales-Day creates playful and sometimes haunting images that are both timely and timeless, encouraging us to see our interconnectedness. The exhibition’s central piece, a large-scale photographic mural titled Xipe Totec with Busts, brings together images of busts of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and Susan B. Anthony (photographed during his residency at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery) with Mexica and Mesoamerican objects, set amongst a deathly pile of skulls from the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin. The work may incite reflection on the precarious state of museums and the battles being fought on both the cultural and global fronts. 

Another series of works draw their inspiration from LACMA’s permanent collection, which served as the basis for the creation of a recently completed monumental public work entitled, Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects. It was commissioned by the Los Angeles MTA for the new D Line Subway Extension Wilshire/Fairfax Station. Here, Gonzales-Day uses museum objects as a starting point for artistic and cultural "excavation," aiming to recover and bring new life to works that may have been overlooked or silenced while also bringing attention to the lack of representation of Black, brown, queer, and other marginalized bodies in many museum collections, offering a critical and visual framework for rethinking these objects. 

In another work, entitled Dying Gaul/Chac Mool, Gonzales-Day juxtaposes the iconic Dying Gaul, a Roman copy of a lost Greek original, humanizing a so-called barbarian, with a Mesoamerican Chac Mool figure, a reclining stone sculpture associated with rituals of sacrifice and renewal. 

It is a portal between worlds and reminds us that the line between art and life can be hard to separate. The two works echo one another, but unlike the myth of Narcissus, evoked by the composition, the reflection suggests that something unseen and powerful lies just beneath the surface—a subtle reference to Latinx communities in the U.S. 

Ken Gonzales-Day: AfterLife is complemented by the artist’s first survey exhibition, Ken Gonzales-Day, History’s Nevermade, curated by Dr. Amelia Jones, on view at the USC Fisher Museum of Art through March 2026. It includes a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by leading scholars in art history, Latinx Studies, and visual culture. 

Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964, Santa Clara, CA) received his MFA in art from UC Irvine; his MA in art history from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.; and was a Van Leer Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP). Fellowships include: the Getty Research Institute (GRI), The Smithsonian SAAM fellowship in American Art, and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship (SARF); The Terra Foundation in Giverny, France; The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy. Gonzales-Day has received fellowships and awards from Art Matters, The Avery Foundation, California Community Foundation, the Los Angeles' COLA award, Creative Capital Fellowship, and a Guggenheim in Photography. 

His work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; The National Gallery Art, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Kalamazoo, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; The Art Museum of Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT; Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA; Pomona College Museum of Art, CA; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris; among others. Monographs include: Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke) and Profiled (LACMA, 2011), Surface Tension (Artist’s Book, 2017). Gonzales-Day received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2017, and has received fellowships and awards from Art Matters, COLA, California Community Foundation, Creative Capital, Smithsonian (SARF), The Rockefeller Foundation, and holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Art at Scripps College. 

Ken Gonzales-Day: Afterlife

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps towards it is to keep a diary…” – George Orwell 

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce John M. Valadez: A Two Second Gaze—Street Photography from the 1970s and 80s. The exhibition will be on view in Gallery 3 from November 8 through December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 8 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. 

A Two Second Gaze—Photography from the 1970s and 80s presents a selection of rarely and never exhibited photographs by John M. Valadez from his seminal body of work, the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio. The series is a visual archive of portraits of neighbors, friends, and everyday people he encountered on walks through his neighborhood in East Los Angeles to and from his studio in Downtown L.A.'s theater district. By situating this work in these Asian, Black, Brown, and immigrant communities, Valadez activated the Chicano movement’s concerns: visibility, space, and pride. The photographs become documents of a moment, capturing culture, street fashion, public spaces, but also a lived Chicano reality in L.A. 

During the late 1970s, the Chicano movement in California was active with artists seeking ways to assert Mexican American identity, and respond to institutional neglect, discrimination, and underrepresentation. Valadez’s photographic work captures this generational moment: the disenfranchised who lived in East L.A., who are connected both to Mexican heritage and American urban life; influenced by popular culture but also grounded in barrio realities. 

As Valadez sought to push realism beyond aesthetics, he instituted a practice of walking with his camera and 36-exposure rolls of Kodachrome color slide film, documenting a cast of characters spotlighted amidst the drama of everyday life. His intention was to seek the heroic figures of daily life that would later develop into his iconic pastels and oil paintings. In this way, the practice of taking photographs on the fly became a form of notetaking and sketching, with the camera's lens able to keep pace with the fast-moving nature of city life. It helped define a visual vocabulary for Chicanos that was not based on caricature or pathologizing, but on presence, style, and individuality. 

What emerges is a living sketchbook, with Valadez engaging directly with his subjects. At a time when portraits were often staged events—scheduled in a studio, dressed for, and posed picture-perfect—Valadez captures the interruption of routine, a respite from the monotony of walking, waiting, working. Valadez’s genuine and humorous presence is palpable from the other side of the lens bringing forth something noble: an exchange, and an appreciation for simply being seen. 

His photos capture a sense of identity being performed—how the subjects present themselves, how they navigate between expectations, popular culture, ethnic identity, and personal style. There is a tension, but also a richness, in being visible, seen, and seen on one’s own terms. 

Valadez started the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio around 1978, and while some may recognize familiar faces from Valadez’s pastels and paintings—figures often lifted from their original scenes—these photographs emphasize Los Angeles itself as a supporting character. Looking back at that time in Downtown L.A., we see familiar architectural settings alongside many urban changes: Brooklyn Ave. becoming Cesar Chavez Ave., the bold fashion styles of late 1970s and early 80s, and sights still familiar today, such as the unhoused sleeping on the street. Alongside this visual backdrop was the psychological and socio-political context of the time: the AIDS epidemic, the struggles of underserved Vietnam veterans, class and racial discrimination, the emergence of new drugs, and Reagan-era cuts to social services that deeply affected the dynamics and character of Downtown L.A. 

Valadez remembers that despite these many issues, however unprecedented or enduring, there was a prevailing sense of optimism, especially in the working-class, multicultural neighborhood of Downtown L.A., brimming with industry, exchange, community, and hope. Valadez elevates portraits of his neighbors, community, and city beyond documentary, allegory, or staged drama. His emphasis on their humanity transcends narrative conventions, offering a form of social commentary that confronts the overlooked realities of urban life—both then and now. 

John M. Valadez (b.1951, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. A trailblazer of the Chicano Art Movement in the 1970s and 80s, Valadez was active in formative collectives such as Los Four and Centro de Arte Público, and he continues to pursue politically engaged work in a career spanning over 50 years, championing Chicano and Latinx communities. Valadez studied at East Los Angeles Junior College from 1970-72 and earned his BFA at California State University, Long Beach in 1976. His works are included in numerous notable collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington, DC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; The Cheech Marin Collection, Riverside, CA; The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; National Mexican Museum, Chicago, IL; Centre d’Art, Santa Monica, Barcelona, ES; El Centro Cultural Tijuana, BC, MX; Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, FR, amongst others. 

JOHN M. VALADEZ: A Two Second Gaze —Street Photography from the 1970s and 80s

The term “Desaparecidos” is often used in discussions of state-sanctioned violence at the hands of dictators throughout the Americas. We are using this term to highlight and condemn recent ICE raids in Southern California and throughout the US. We recognize the urgency of this moment, and the resilience of  our communities that have historically suffered and resisted fascist government, including here at home.  

We take this moment, while the veil is thin, to be in communion and honor members of our community who have been disappeared from Los Angeles homes, workplaces, schools, and streets due to ICE raids and anti-immigrant actions. Together, we will remember, resist, and celebrate life through art, ritual, and collective healing. 

Desaparecidos exhibits artwork from our mutual networks, bringing together shoebox ofrendas or “nichos” contributed through an open call and workshops hosted by SPARC muralist Rosy Cortez. The exhibition also includes works by Judy Baca, Elsie Sims, the HILL Network, a community ofrenda by Candy Angel, and many volunteers who contributed time and care to transform the gallery.

Please join us on Saturday, November 1st, from 5-8 pm for the opening of Desaparecidos and the 23rd annual Día de los Muertos celebration and ritual—a night of altars, art, food, and mariachis. Program, including gallery remarks and the Día de los Muertos invocation ritual, begins at 6 pm.

Desaparecidos

Durón Gallery at SPARC

Moonglow Metanoia situates Kevin Umana’s practice within the context of Los Angeles. The show is a meditation on the city’s light and atmosphere, specifically the haze and smog that both obscure and enhance its landscapes. Growing up in Los Angeles, Umaña recalls mornings and evenings where pollution and particulate matter shaped the sky into bands of orange, purple, and pink—reminders that something negative can produce something beautiful. This memory serves as a metaphor for perspective: distance and time alter perception, just as leaving Los Angeles allowed him to see his hometown anew. “By backing away, I was able to see it all in a new light. This show is a return with a new perspective,” says Umaña.