This month’s exhibitions celebrate veteran breakthroughs as well as contemporary artists forging their own paths. Pace Gallery pays tribute to iconic African American photographer Gordon Parks, while Eastern Projects pays homage to Chicano collective Los Four, celebrating the 50th anniversary of their groundbreaking Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition. Rusha & Co. presents the first in a series of exhibitions highlighting Parallel Magazinewhile Sade showcased collages by reclusive Denver artist John Lupe. FOCA presented a group show of young artists exploring how the internet mediates our world, Wendy Red Star excavated historical artifacts to recover their indigenous origins, and Chiffon Thomas’ futuristic bronze and stained glass sculptures conveyed untold stories.
John Lupe: Everything is Others, Everything is Us
Everything is others, everything is us Delve into the life and work of reclusive artist John Lupe. A fixture on the New York art scene in the 1980s, Lupe returned to his hometown of Denver after becoming a father, and over the next few decades he created poetic found-object assemblages and mixed-media paintings, like Joseph Cornell of the Rockies, in relative solitude. The exhibition offers a glimpse into Lupe’s desire to connect with the world despite his distance from it.
Sade (sade-la.com)
204 South 19th Street, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles
As of July 7
Kentaro Kawabata / Bruce Nauman
The exhibition brings together two artists who, at first glance, seem a bit odd: Japanese porcelain sculptor Kentaro Kawabata and American multimedia artist Bruce Nauman. Kawabata is known for his whimsical, fantastical ceramics that look like strange creatures or vessels that crackle and pop, freezing the energy of the kiln. The range of Nauman’s practice is on display in the exhibition, including his early ceramic experiments, large-scale sculptures, videos, and the series Infrared emitting tube (1968/2006) and Fingers and holes (1994), whose highly saturated colors echo the bright orange glazes along the edges of Kawabata’s works.
Nonaka-Hill (nonaka-hill.com)
720 Hollywood and Highland Boulevard, Los Angeles
As of July 20
““Los Four”: Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 50th Anniversary Exhibition 1974–2024
In 1974, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an exhibition of Chicano art collective Los Four, including artists such as Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, and Frank Romero, marking the museum’s first exhibition of Chicano artists. Their paintings, sculptures, and murals depicted Mexican-American life in Los Angeles and the Southwest, indigenous symbols on both sides of the border, and the civil rights struggle of “El Movimiento” with expressionist energy. This groundbreaking exhibition proved that Chicano art (previously dismissed as “craft” or “graffiti”) was quintessentially American, as resident in cultural institutions as other respected art movements. In honor of the LACMA exhibition’s 50th anniversary, the East Project will celebrate its legacy by presenting works spanning five decades, including contemporary works by Romero.
Eastern Projects (easternprojectsgallery.com)
900 North Broadway #1090, Chinatown, Los Angeles
As of August 3
I’d Love to Meet You: A Juxtapoz Magazine Story at 30 (Part 1)
Juxtapoz Magazine Thirty years ago, Robert Williams, Fausto Vitello, CR Stecyk III, Greg Escalante and Eric Swenson founded Arts & Culture magazine in California as a platform for alternative and underground visual culture. The magazine challenged traditional hierarchies and broke down the boundaries between “low art” and “high art,” championing street art, surf/car/skate culture, and other non-mainstream art forms. I really hope to see youThe first in a series of exhibitions showcasing the magazine’s influence, the exhibition features works on paper by several artists who have been featured in the magazine, including April Bey, Corita Kent, Hannah Lupton Reinhard, Nehemiah Cisneros, Ozzie Juarez, Mark Ryden, rafa esparza, Raymond Pettibon, Swoon, and more.
Rusha & Co (rusha.co)
244 West Florence Avenue, Florence, Los Angeles
As of August 14
Hyperobjects: Art in the Age of YOLO*
Hyperobjects: Art in the Age of YOLO* The exhibition features work by seven contemporary artists born between 1991 and 2003, a generation that grew up on the internet. It is framed around the concept of “hyperobjects,” a term coined by Timothy Morton in 2008 to “describe the kinds of things you can study, think about, and calculate but can’t easily see directly,” and “YOLO,” an acronym for “You Only Live Once” that was ubiquitous during the artists’ adolescence. Here, Ryan Krugerton, Chandler Dangaard, May Nolan, Violet Treadwell-Hull, Peña Espinosa-Peña, Felix Quintana, and Gabriel Tolson explore the role of digital media in mediating our experience of reality, and nostalgia for the freedoms of an earlier internet.
Contemporary Art Researcher (focala.org)
970 North Broadway, Room 208, Chinatown, Los Angeles
As of August 17
Chiffon Thomas: Descendants
Shivon Thomas’ bronze, stained glass, and steel sculptures fuse materiality and monumentality, evoking labor, collective perseverance, and historical injustices of oblivion. Cast faces and heads shatter into brightly colored panels of glass, and obelisks are topped with glass pyramids that resemble stitched skin. In these moving and unsettling works, Thomas connects our bodies, the spaces they inhabit, and the stories they tell.
Michael Kohn Gallery (kohngallery.com)
1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
As of August 17
Humaira Abid: Searching for Home
Pakistani-born artist Humaira Abid pays tribute to the hardships and resilience of migrants and refugees, particularly women, displaced by war, persecution, and ecological disaster through her intricately crafted wood sculptures. Notable works in the exhibition include Searching for Home (2016-17), a lifelike wooden suitcase stained blood red; Remaining Fragments of Home II (2019-20), where a rearview mirror reflects scenes of life and loss; and The World Is Not Perfect (2014-17), a collection of bricks and shoes carved from pine, mahogany, and tulipwood.
USC Pacific Asia Museum (pacificasiamuseum.usc.edu)
46 North Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena, CA
As of August 18
Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks was a versatile, boundary-pushing photographer whose work ranged from documenting the Civil Rights Movement to celebrity, fashion and sports portraits, and photographic essays, for which he was the first black photographer. Life magazine. (He also directed axis In 1971, he helped create the blaxploitation film genre. ) The Pace exhibition, organized by Kimberly Drew in partnership with the Gordon Parks Foundation, spans the early 1940s to the mid-1980s and features about 40 photographs. They include work produced for the Farm Security Administration (FSA); depictions of black spirituals; and The story of apartheid (1956), which documented life in segregated America, and his short film Diary of a Harlem Family (1967).
Pace Gallery (pacegallery.com)
1201 South La Brea Avenue, Central Wilshire, Los Angeles
July 12 – August 24
Wendy Red Star: Bíikkua (The Scraper)
Bishkishe is an Apsáalooke term for a rawhide container used to transport goods over long distances on horseback, made by women from several North American indigenous groups. BishkisheIn , Wendy Red Star has studied 226 of these functional objects and reproduced each one’s unique, colorful geometric patterns in meticulously rendered paintings. Bíikkua (Skin Scrapers) The exhibition features 184 works, each named after a woman from her tribe, attempting to recapture abstract concepts that have been subsumed into Western art history and pay tribute to their origins and creators.
Roberts Projects (robertsprojectsla.com)
442 South La Brea Avenue, Hancock Park, Los Angeles
July 13 – August 24
Summer 24
As world-class galleries have settled in Los Angeles, a new crop of grassroots spaces has sprung up, the latest of which is 839. Founded by writer and historian Liz Hirsch and artist Joshua Smith, 839’s inaugural exhibition features a diverse range of works by contemporary artists from Los Angeles and New York, including the mesmerizing lanyard weavings of Andrés Janacua, the evocative photography of Nichelle Dailey, and post-minimalist sculptures by a still-living artist (inexplicably referred to as the Estate of Joshua Caleb Webley).
839 (839gallery.com)
839 North Cherokee Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
As of August 31
