The art community across Los Angeles is turning its gaze toward the past this November, excavating and reframing history through novel visual juxtapositions, deep archival findings, and ambitious institutional retrospectives. Across the city’s diverse neighborhoods—from Chinatown and Downtown to historic cultural centers like Leimert Park—galleries, museums, and unconventional spaces are hosting exhibitions that bridge historical memory with contemporary urgency.
Artists this season are tackling everything from the Salem Witch Trials to the rich legacy of pioneering Black-run art institutions. Isabelle Frances McGuire examines historical panic through an interactive lens, while Milano Chow draws directly upon the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library to conjure ghostly architectural facades. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a long-overdue exhibition honors the city’s historic Brockman Gallery, which provided a crucial platform for generations of Black artists. Meanwhile, multi-venue surveys across the region highlight the complex, interconnected careers of figures like Todd Gray and Reggie Burrows Hodges, reflecting a city-wide momentum rooted in storytelling, cultural preservation, and critical introspection.
Isabelle Frances McGuire: Joy is a Puppet
Bel Ami, 709 North Hill Street, Suite #105 and #103, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Through November 28
Isabelle Frances McGuire engages directly with historical narratives, dusting off iconic figures and disrupting their traditional status to underscore their underlying humanity. In her exhibition Joy is a Puppet, currently on view at Bel Ami in Chinatown, McGuire trains her focus on the Salem Witch Trials. This dark period of American history has taken on an increasingly uneasy relevance as contemporary society navigates an era marked by creeping authoritarianism and renewed social panics. The exhibition features a diverse array of media, including a bronze statue, a trio of frogs, and an intricate assemblage of baskets. Central to the presentation is an interactive video game that places the viewer directly into the shoes of a woman accused of witchcraft, forcing the player to navigate impossible choices and figure out their next survival strategy in a hostile environment.
April Bey: All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them…They’re Worthless
Vielmetter Los Angeles, 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, #101, Downtown, Los Angeles
October 31–December 19
Bahamian-American artist April Bey explores themes of love, romance, and interpersonal companionship through a vibrant new series of fabric works on view at Vielmetter Los Angeles. These pieces represent the latest chapter in Bey’s ongoing Atlantica project, a conceptual narrative in which the artist assumes the identity of an extraterrestrial being sending dispatches about human life back to her home planet. Incorporating luxurious materials such as crushed velvet, metallic brocade, sherpa fabric, and lace, the large-scale woven tapestries feature striking portraits. These images were captured during a 2024 residency in the historically Black community of Orange Mound in Memphis, Tennessee, successfully depicting scenes of tender queer intimacy within Bey’s opulent, science-fiction-inspired textile world.
Charles Arnoldi: String Theory
Michael Kohn Gallery, 1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through December 19
Charles Arnoldi has spent nearly six decades expanding and redefining the boundaries of abstraction, moving fluidly from his early twig-and-stick constructions to chainsaw-carved plywood sculptures and hard-edge geometric paintings. String Theory focuses on a specific body of work created between 2016 and 2019, featuring paintings in which networks of lyrical lines dance dynamically across the surface. The fluid, energetic gestures are held in careful tension by the rectilinear boundaries of the canvas. Balancing visual delight with formal complexity, these paintings are in active dialogue with the legacies of modern masters like Brice Marden and Alexander Calder, while simultaneously forging compelling, autonomous directions within Arnoldi’s celebrated career.
iris yirei hu: Unconscious Relics
Official Welcome, 672 South La Fayette Park Place, Suite 46, Westlake, Los Angeles
Through December 19
Iris yirei hu looks to dreams, ancestral knowledge, collective ritual, and the natural world to ground contemporary issues within enduring traditional frameworks. Her exhibition Unconscious Relics brings together new paintings, ceramics, and reliquary boxes adorned with images and objects carrying deep personal and cultural significance. These works draw extensively from Indigenous Tongva customs as well as traditional Chinese herbal medicine. By juxtaposing these disparate symbols and belief systems, hu layers history to construct new mythologies tailored for our current, troubled times.
Milano Chow: Fantasy Street and Deborah Turbeville: The Lifted Veil
Hollyhock House, 4800 Hollywood Boulevard, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles
Through December 20
Milano Chow creates stark, haunting architectural facades and interiors utilizing graphite, ink, and photo transfer. For her project Fantasy Street, Chow ventured deep into the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library, pulling historical images of early-20th-century movie theaters, retail shops, and apartment buildings. She used these archival fragments to construct fictional, dreamlike structures. The works are displayed within an unfurnished room inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic Hollyhock House and are mounted on folding screens custom-designed by the artist. This presentation places Chow’s contemporary fictions into direct conversation with Wright’s architecture. Alongside her own work, Chow curated The Lifted Veil, showcasing surreal, atmospheric photographs by Deborah Turbeville from the 1970s through the 1990s that mirror Chow’s signature sense of entrancing alienation.
Yuntao Xu: Estranged Landscape
Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station, 1020 East Palmer Avenue, Glendale, California
Through January 8, 2027
Los Angeles has a long, vibrant tradition of housing art spaces in unconventional locations—from strip malls and storefronts to residential apartments. The Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station in Glendale continues this legacy. Within this modest, window-lined architectural box, architect and artist Yuntao Xu has constructed an immersive installation inspired by the surrounding Southern California landscape. Composed of reflective fabric suspended from the ceiling, fluffy textiles, and atmospheric colored lights, Estranged Landscape echoes the dramatic contours of local peaks and valleys, filtering them through a campy, space-age aesthetic.
Todd Gray: Church and State
The Brick, 518 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through January 16, 2027
Todd Gray’s celebrated photographic assemblages combine images of fine art, classical architecture, and the natural world into ambitious tableaux that expose the deeply intertwined threads of colonialism, power, and culture. Long before establishing himself as a prominent contemporary artist, however, Gray built a prolific career as a teenage commercial photographer. He captured legendary musical acts including the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, shot iconic album covers for Gladys Knight and Bobby Brown, and eventually served as Michael Jackson’s personal photographer. Church and State brings these two distinct bodies of work together for the very first time, complemented by biographical ephemera that document Gray’s formative experiences as a Black man coming of age in Los Angeles throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Julie Tolentino: And Never Ends
Fulcrum Arts, 544 North Fair Oaks Avenue, Pasadena, California
Through January 23, 2027
Julie Tolentino’s multidisciplinary art practice seamlessly incorporates performance, sound, installation, scent, and text. Her current exhibition at Fulcrum Arts purposefully aims to "decenter the visual," inviting visitors to engage with their other senses, with a particular emphasis on hearing. Eschewing a static, traditional gallery presentation, the new installation features cultured crystals, an evolving auditory composition, and performance-based drawings. Together, these elements form a living, breathing environment that continues to change and develop dynamically throughout the run of the exhibition.
The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Through January 24, 2027
The Brockman Gallery stands as Los Angeles’s first major art gallery founded and run by and for Black artists. Operating from 1967 until 1990, the gallery exhibited foundational works by David Hammons, Ulysses Jenkins, Suzanne Jackson, Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar, and many others during the early stages of their careers. Founded by brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis shortly after the Watts Rebellion, the venue served as an indispensable cultural and community hub in Leimert Park. This landmark exhibition marks the first large-scale institutional retrospective dedicated to the gallery, charting its historic legacy through more than 60 artworks and rare archival materials.
Reggie Burrows Hodges: A Theater of Dreams, A Theater of Miracles, A Theater of Passions
Art + Practice, 3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles
California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles
Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles
Through February 28, 2027
Spanning three distinct cultural institutions across Los Angeles, this ambitious multi-venue exhibition highlights the work of Los Angeles-born artist Reggie Burrows Hodges. His expressionistic paintings bridge a deep engagement with historical painting traditions alongside autobiographical narratives and vibrant scenes of contemporary Black life. A Theater of Miracles, hosted by the California African American Museum, examines the influence of Old Master paintings, featuring works such as Jacopo Bassano’s 1554 painting "The Miracle of the Quails" on loan from the Getty. Concurrently, A Theater of Passions at the Getty Center exhibits new paintings inspired by the work of father-and-daughter Baroque painters Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Finally, A Theater of Dreams at Art + Practice reflects on the artist’s childhood growing up in Compton alongside memories of his travels through Europe, where he first encountered many of these historical masterworks in person.
