(Kissi Ussuki / For The Times)
16 ambitious art shows to see in and around L.A. this fall
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Keeping the doors open and the personnel paid and the programs running and the scholarship supported is not a minor miracle for museums these days but a major one. The current economic and political climate has been oppressive, to put it mildly. Many institutions are struggling to stay afloat and make good on their mandates.
For the record:
6:01 p.m. Sept. 3, 2026A previous version of the entry on ‘Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw’ at David Zwirner Gallery said that a new edition of DeCarava’s 1960 book was published to accompany the show. It was not. It also said that the Zwirner show was the first exhibition of this particular body of work since 1983. It is the largest such exhibition, but not the first.
All the more reason to marvel at what’s on tap in the coming season: a plethora of exhibitions that are ambitious, relevant and revelatory. Shows that both broaden and deepen established art history, fleshing out stories we knew only skeletally, and introducing figures whose significance we may have overlooked entirely. So much to savor, and so much to learn from. (Fees marked below based on adult ticket pricing.)
Showing Place Places
‘De la Torre Brothers: The Tipping Point’
Laguna Beach Exhibition
An installation image of a table set for a feast as part of “De la Torre Brothers: The Tipping Point” at Laguna Art Museum.
(Einar and Jamex de la Torre / Laguna Art Museum)
Consumption doesn’t get any more conspicuous than this. The centerpiece of this show is a room-size installation that might make you feel as though you’ve happened upon a banquet in progress, goblets tilting, chairs askew. Or that the party is over and you’re examining the relics of an empire collapsed under the weight of its own self-indulgence. The table is set to overflowing with sculpture in blown glass, cast resin and more. The walls are papered in extravagant patterns and mounted with taxidermy. Chandeliers rife with symbols of power and resistance hang over it all. The scene is outrageous, hilarious, irreverent, grotesque and spectacular.
Einar and Jamex de la Torre, brothers and collaborators for three decades, were born in Guadalajara, Mexico, raised in Southern California, and now work on both sides of the border. Self-described maximalists, they take the traditional painted still life, with its signifiers of wealth and mortality, to an immersive extreme. Capitalism, cannibalism, sex, religion, death — everything’s on the table.
Where: Laguna Art Museum
When: Through Jan. 24, 2027
Price: $15
Einar and Jamex de la Torre, brothers and collaborators for three decades, were born in Guadalajara, Mexico, raised in Southern California, and now work on both sides of the border. Self-described maximalists, they take the traditional painted still life, with its signifiers of wealth and mortality, to an immersive extreme. Capitalism, cannibalism, sex, religion, death — everything’s on the table.
Where: Laguna Art Museum
When: Through Jan. 24, 2027
Price: $15
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‘Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography' and 'Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles’
Brentwood Exhibition
“En su propia carcel,” 1950, Lola Alvarez Bravo.
(The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Mexican poet Octavio Paz was a high school student when he first came across the photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The encounter was crystallizing. “I felt a strange bewilderment,” he later recalled, “followed by the joy that accompanies understanding, no matter how incomplete.” Bravo’s photographs of familiar objects made unfamiliar through cropping, light, rhythm and pattern, resonated with Paz’s experience of reading modern poetry.
The reminiscence appears in his book, “Instante y Revelación (Instant and Revelation).” Its title has been adapted for the Getty’s exhibition of 13 stellar 20th century Mexican photographers, including Bravo, Mariana Yampolsky, Pedro Meyer, Graciela Iturbide, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and Lola Álvarez Bravo. Lines from a Paz poem serve as section headings (“El ojo piensa, el pensamiento ve / The eye thinks, thought sees,” for instance), establishing an evocative framework for viewing.
A concurrent show also straddles the familiar/unfamiliar divide, highlighting the work of five photographers representing aspects of Chicanx and Latinx communities in L.A. Laura Aguilar, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez, Reynaldo Rivera and Ricardo Valverde document the body and the body politic, the personal and the performative.
Where: Getty Center
When: Sept. 1-Jan. 3, 2027
Price: Free (timed entry required)
The reminiscence appears in his book, “Instante y Revelación (Instant and Revelation).” Its title has been adapted for the Getty’s exhibition of 13 stellar 20th century Mexican photographers, including Bravo, Mariana Yampolsky, Pedro Meyer, Graciela Iturbide, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and Lola Álvarez Bravo. Lines from a Paz poem serve as section headings (“El ojo piensa, el pensamiento ve / The eye thinks, thought sees,” for instance), establishing an evocative framework for viewing.
A concurrent show also straddles the familiar/unfamiliar divide, highlighting the work of five photographers representing aspects of Chicanx and Latinx communities in L.A. Laura Aguilar, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez, Reynaldo Rivera and Ricardo Valverde document the body and the body politic, the personal and the performative.
Where: Getty Center
When: Sept. 1-Jan. 3, 2027
Price: Free (timed entry required)
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Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Exposition Park Exhibition
Ernie Barnes, “The Critic’s Corner,” 2007.
(Matt Kroening/Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)
What exactly is narrative art? If everything has a story, is a story, how to differentiate between a narrative work and a nonnarrative work?
The opening of a museum that headlines its commitment to “telling stories through images” might suggest some clarity is forthcoming, but the inaugural shows promise more of a rich muddle — a grab bag of paintings, comics, illustration and films whose only real common denominator is the grabber himself, collector and filmmaker George Lucas.
Choose your operative word (rich or muddle?) and you’ll have chosen your own adventure through the more than 1,200 works on display. The range is wild, spanning from Alison Bechdel to Frank Frazetta, Beatrix Potter to Jacob Lawrence, manga to murals, movie props to social documentary photographs. There are gems here, for sure, and little if any of that pesky, problematic abstraction to distract from all the promised archetypal and approachable tales of human experience.
Where: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
When: Opens Sept. 22
Price: $25
The opening of a museum that headlines its commitment to “telling stories through images” might suggest some clarity is forthcoming, but the inaugural shows promise more of a rich muddle — a grab bag of paintings, comics, illustration and films whose only real common denominator is the grabber himself, collector and filmmaker George Lucas.
Choose your operative word (rich or muddle?) and you’ll have chosen your own adventure through the more than 1,200 works on display. The range is wild, spanning from Alison Bechdel to Frank Frazetta, Beatrix Potter to Jacob Lawrence, manga to murals, movie props to social documentary photographs. There are gems here, for sure, and little if any of that pesky, problematic abstraction to distract from all the promised archetypal and approachable tales of human experience.
Where: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
When: Opens Sept. 22
Price: $25
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Three Paul R. Williams Exhibitions
University Park Exhibition
(Della M. Williams Trust / Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)
“I AM an architect,” Paul Revere Williams declared at the start of an article published in “The American Magazine” in 1937. The title of the piece, “I am a NEGRO,” was just as typographically insistent and served within the article as a poignant refrain, yanking his impressive tale of professional accomplishment back to the discriminatory conditions on the ground. Williams (1894-1980) was the first African American architect to be licensed in the West, and the first to be elected a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He designed homes for high-profile clients like Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball, as well as affordable, multifamily housing. His nearly six-decade career, largely centered in Los Angeles but ranging internationally, yielded thousands of building projects and urban plans.
Being both an architect and Black proved a formidable challenge. If there’s one story told about Williams, it’s how he taught himself to draw plans upside-down, so white clients on the opposite side of the table would feel a kind of partnership in the development of the designs before them, while not risking the discomfort of standing or sitting beside him. Williams was eloquent about how he addressed what he called his “racial handicap,” and also about how good design contributes to the social good. Three exhibitions — “Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living,” “Paul R. Williams: Architecture Across the Color Line” and “Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered” — fill out the story of Williams’ life, work, context and influence through photographs, plans and newly commissioned works by contemporary artists. They are accompanied by a deeply informative book.
Where: “An Architect Considered” at USC Fisher Museum of Art; “Architect for Living” at LACMA; “Architecture Across the Color Line” at Getty Research Institute
When: “An Architect Considered” runs through March 13, 2027; “Artchitect for Living” runs Nov. 15-May 31, 2027; “Architecture Across the Color Line” runs Dec. 15-March 14, 2027
Price: USC Fisher is free; Getty is free with timed reservation; LACMA is $25 for L.A. County residents, otherwise $30
Being both an architect and Black proved a formidable challenge. If there’s one story told about Williams, it’s how he taught himself to draw plans upside-down, so white clients on the opposite side of the table would feel a kind of partnership in the development of the designs before them, while not risking the discomfort of standing or sitting beside him. Williams was eloquent about how he addressed what he called his “racial handicap,” and also about how good design contributes to the social good. Three exhibitions — “Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living,” “Paul R. Williams: Architecture Across the Color Line” and “Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered” — fill out the story of Williams’ life, work, context and influence through photographs, plans and newly commissioned works by contemporary artists. They are accompanied by a deeply informative book.
Where: “An Architect Considered” at USC Fisher Museum of Art; “Architect for Living” at LACMA; “Architecture Across the Color Line” at Getty Research Institute
When: “An Architect Considered” runs through March 13, 2027; “Artchitect for Living” runs Nov. 15-May 31, 2027; “Architecture Across the Color Line” runs Dec. 15-March 14, 2027
Price: USC Fisher is free; Getty is free with timed reservation; LACMA is $25 for L.A. County residents, otherwise $30
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‘Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck’
East Hollywood Exhibition
“In everything there is the trace,” 2013, Susan Silton, mixed-media.
(Brian Forrest)
It’s telling that a key part of Susan Silton’s show at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery takes place outside the gallery’s walls, and even that it features the work of others — in this case, five L.A.-area poets. As an extension of her own first major survey exhibition, the L.A.-based Silton commissioned the poets (Rocío Carlos, Cathy Linh Che, Erin Marie Lynch, Lynne Thompson, Terry Wolverton) to write texts that will appear on hand-painted billboards among the pines in Barnsdall Park, a piece she calls “Civilized Voices.”
Collaboration, participation and nontraditional modes of engagement are central to Silton’s work, which has taken forms including whistling recitals, wrapping a museum in a vibrantly striped fumigation tent, an opera performed through her studio windows, and a series of photographs designed to be crumpled before they are hung on the wall. This show, which derives its title from an Adrienne Rich poem, will feature more than 150 works in text, sound, video, installation and more. Across media, Silton’s work explores the idiosyncratic, individual voice, how it can be used as a means of connecting with others as well as challenging the status quo.
Where: Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
When: Sept. 3-Nov. 22
Price: Free
Collaboration, participation and nontraditional modes of engagement are central to Silton’s work, which has taken forms including whistling recitals, wrapping a museum in a vibrantly striped fumigation tent, an opera performed through her studio windows, and a series of photographs designed to be crumpled before they are hung on the wall. This show, which derives its title from an Adrienne Rich poem, will feature more than 150 works in text, sound, video, installation and more. Across media, Silton’s work explores the idiosyncratic, individual voice, how it can be used as a means of connecting with others as well as challenging the status quo.
Where: Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
When: Sept. 3-Nov. 22
Price: Free
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‘Cecilia Vicuña: Quipu of Encounters: The Dream of Water' and 'Julian Charrière’
Downtown L.A. Exhibition
“The Gods Must Be Crazy,” 2019, Julian Charriere.
(Jens Ziehe)
Cecilia Vicuña and Julian Charrière were both winners of the inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize, awarded through MoCA in 2024. The prize, to be given every two years until 2030, supports the commission of new work by artists who engage with climate, conservation and environmental justice. These two shows promise a provocative marriage of poetry, presence and politics.
Vicuña, based in New York and her native Chile, describes her work as an interaction of sound, weaving and language. She has worked in sculpture and performance for six decades, often using the quipu, an ancient Andean system of record-keeping through knotting, as form and metaphor. Her new project centers on water as sustenance and a human right, and will culminate in the collaborative creation of a quipu.
Charrière, a Swiss-French artist based in Berlin, works across the disciplines of photography, installation, sculpture and film. He conducts fieldwork in charged, fragile environments — glaciers, volcanoes, nuclear test zones, oceans — and creates immersive spaces for meditation on natural and human-centered processes, memory, change and more. His show, too, will center on water systems, their precarity and endurance.
Where: MoCA Grand Avenue
When: Nov. 15-June 6, 2027
Price: Free with reservation
Vicuña, based in New York and her native Chile, describes her work as an interaction of sound, weaving and language. She has worked in sculpture and performance for six decades, often using the quipu, an ancient Andean system of record-keeping through knotting, as form and metaphor. Her new project centers on water as sustenance and a human right, and will culminate in the collaborative creation of a quipu.
Charrière, a Swiss-French artist based in Berlin, works across the disciplines of photography, installation, sculpture and film. He conducts fieldwork in charged, fragile environments — glaciers, volcanoes, nuclear test zones, oceans — and creates immersive spaces for meditation on natural and human-centered processes, memory, change and more. His show, too, will center on water systems, their precarity and endurance.
Where: MoCA Grand Avenue
When: Nov. 15-June 6, 2027
Price: Free with reservation
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‘Doyle Lane: Master of Clay’
San Marino Exhibition
Mask, Doyle Lane, 1960s.
(Jeff McLane / Estate of Doyle Lane)
Several shows opening this fall are stand-alone stars that connect in a constellation of sorts, articulating a larger picture. Doyle Lane’s first major museum retrospective is bound to gleam on its own, while also resonating with LACMA’s survey of the Brockman Gallery, where Lane had a show in 1968, and Craft in America’s spread on Laura Andreson, a fellow midcentury ceramic artist given to reductive forms and resplendent, painterly surfaces. And, like architect Paul R. Williams, featured in a trio of exhibitions across town, Lane made his way with vision and persistence as an African American in a stubbornly restricted, segregated profession.
Born in New Orleans, Lane (1923-2002) moved to L.A. in 1946, where he studied ceramics, exhibited where he could, filled numerous commissions and worked for a spell as a glaze technician. Lane conjured sumptuous colors, vigorous surfaces and musical rhythms in his work, from his exquisite little “Weed Pots” to wall-mounted clay paintings and extensive tile murals. This show covers the range, through more than 100 works and a catalog that tells Lane’s little-known story with breadth and urgency.
Where: The Huntington
When: Sept. 13-Feb. 22, 2027
Price: $29
Born in New Orleans, Lane (1923-2002) moved to L.A. in 1946, where he studied ceramics, exhibited where he could, filled numerous commissions and worked for a spell as a glaze technician. Lane conjured sumptuous colors, vigorous surfaces and musical rhythms in his work, from his exquisite little “Weed Pots” to wall-mounted clay paintings and extensive tile murals. This show covers the range, through more than 100 works and a catalog that tells Lane’s little-known story with breadth and urgency.
Where: The Huntington
When: Sept. 13-Feb. 22, 2027
Price: $29
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‘Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw’
East Hollywood Exhibition
“Jackie at the barricade,” c. 1956, Roy DeCarava
(The Estate of Roy DeCarava. )
Roy DeCarava felt photography and jazz were kindred arts. They both worked their wonders in the “thickness” found within slivers of time. Both expressed their makers’ profound singularity of mind and heart.
In 1960, DeCarava (1919-2009) created a maquette of a book he titled “the sound i saw: improvisation on a jazz theme.” In it, his photographs of everyday life in Harlem are interspersed with images of John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and others, taken during and between sets. Throughout the book, DeCarava’s own free verse provides yet another layer of musicality, texture and rhythm. It was reissued by David Zwirner Books in 2019, and makes a great companion to the show, the largest presentation of this body of work since 1983.
DeCarava turned exclusively to photography in the 1940s, after studying painting and printmaking. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, the first Black photographer to do so. His stated project, to counter the dearth of serious, artistic representations of Black people, serves as a good umbrella description of his life’s work. He used his camera as an instrument of reverence. Expect of this show the intimate and immersive. Prepare for poetry of a multisensory order.
Where: David Zwirner Gallery
When: Sept. 19-Oct. 31
Price: Free
In 1960, DeCarava (1919-2009) created a maquette of a book he titled “the sound i saw: improvisation on a jazz theme.” In it, his photographs of everyday life in Harlem are interspersed with images of John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and others, taken during and between sets. Throughout the book, DeCarava’s own free verse provides yet another layer of musicality, texture and rhythm. It was reissued by David Zwirner Books in 2019, and makes a great companion to the show, the largest presentation of this body of work since 1983.
DeCarava turned exclusively to photography in the 1940s, after studying painting and printmaking. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, the first Black photographer to do so. His stated project, to counter the dearth of serious, artistic representations of Black people, serves as a good umbrella description of his life’s work. He used his camera as an instrument of reverence. Expect of this show the intimate and immersive. Prepare for poetry of a multisensory order.
Where: David Zwirner Gallery
When: Sept. 19-Oct. 31
Price: Free
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‘Laura Andreson and Her Legacy’
Beverly Grove Exhibition
Laura Andreson, 1979
(M. Lee Fatherree)
The 1950s were a pivotal decade for ceramics in Southern California, thanks in part to large, transformational work made by men like Peter Voulkos and John Mason. But things were actively percolating here a generation earlier, and the burgeoning of the clay scene in the ’30s owes much to a woman who sculpted small, elegant vessels sheathed in sumptuous color.
Laura Andreson (1902-1999) trained as a teacher at UCLA, earned her MFA in painting at Columbia, then returned west to lead the nascent ceramics program at UCLA where she taught until 1970. Andreson bristled at “superfluous” decoration, favoring distilled jar, box, bowl and vase forms influenced by her love for Scandinavian and Bauhaus design. She became a wizard with glazes, conjuring lustrous surfaces resonant with elements of the Southern California landscape. This show offers a rare opportunity to savor the gorgeous purity of her work, alongside that of several of her mentors and peers, such as Gertrud and Otto Natzler and Glen Lukens, as well as some of her students, including JB Blunk and Bernard Kester.
Where: Craft in America
When: Oct. 10-Jan. 9, 2027
Price: Free
Laura Andreson (1902-1999) trained as a teacher at UCLA, earned her MFA in painting at Columbia, then returned west to lead the nascent ceramics program at UCLA where she taught until 1970. Andreson bristled at “superfluous” decoration, favoring distilled jar, box, bowl and vase forms influenced by her love for Scandinavian and Bauhaus design. She became a wizard with glazes, conjuring lustrous surfaces resonant with elements of the Southern California landscape. This show offers a rare opportunity to savor the gorgeous purity of her work, alongside that of several of her mentors and peers, such as Gertrud and Otto Natzler and Glen Lukens, as well as some of her students, including JB Blunk and Bernard Kester.
Where: Craft in America
When: Oct. 10-Jan. 9, 2027
Price: Free
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‘Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images’ and ‘Mavis Pusey: Restless’
Westwood Exhibition
Untitled, n.d. Mavis Pusey
(Neil Lane Collection / Estate of Mavis Pusey)
“Why am I restless?” Mavis Pusey asked in a poem from 1974. By that time, the painter and printmaker (1928-2019) had a work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and had been included in a show of Black artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Born in Jamaica, she moved to New York to study fashion, and her work as a designer and patternmaker (including in London and Paris) helped sustain her art practice. Whether attending to the urban landscape or the human figure, Pusey’s imagery was dynamic and distilled, her surfaces vibrant constructions of rhythm, pattern and color. Restless might have been one word to describe her. Versatile, determined, independent and under-recognized are others.
Two exhibitions this fall will help familiarize audiences with this remarkable woman. “Mobile Images” is a full-scale survey co-organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and is accompanied by a rich and thorough catalog. “Restless” also adds a Pusey publication to the shelf. The Benton show focuses mostly on Pusey’s prints, drawing exclusively from the collection of Ian White, artist, educator and son of esteemed artist Charles White.
Where: ‘Mobile Images’ at the Hammer (map pin); ‘Restless’ at Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College
When: ‘Mobile Images’ runs Oct. 11-Feb. 28, 2027; ‘Restless’ runs through Jan. 3, 2027
Price: Free
Two exhibitions this fall will help familiarize audiences with this remarkable woman. “Mobile Images” is a full-scale survey co-organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and is accompanied by a rich and thorough catalog. “Restless” also adds a Pusey publication to the shelf. The Benton show focuses mostly on Pusey’s prints, drawing exclusively from the collection of Ian White, artist, educator and son of esteemed artist Charles White.
Where: ‘Mobile Images’ at the Hammer (map pin); ‘Restless’ at Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College
When: ‘Mobile Images’ runs Oct. 11-Feb. 28, 2027; ‘Restless’ runs through Jan. 3, 2027
Price: Free
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‘The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967-1990’
Mid-Wilshire Exhibition
(Museum Associates)
When, in the mid-’60s, Alonzo Davis discerned that his university coursework in art history concentrated nearly entirely on white, Western artists, he set out to broaden his education on his own. He consulted with one of L.A.’s reigning Black artists, Charles White, and took off on a road trip with his younger brother, Dale, to explore the rich veins of African American art being made across the country. Not long after their return to L.A., the brothers, artists themselves, founded the Brockman Gallery, which eventually occupied an entire row of storefronts in Leimert Park.
For more than two decades, the gallery served as a vital cultural hub, staging exhibitions, festivals, concerts, literary events and more. Named after the brothers’ maternal grandmother, born enslaved, the Brockman Gallery was a flourishing, ongoing act of self-determination in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. It showcased Black artists whose opportunities were severely limited at mainstream, white-run institutions and galleries: David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, John Outterbridge, Elizabeth Catlett, Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy and many more. More than 60 works by artists associated with the gallery will be included in this first full-scale consideration of the Brockman’s scope and impact.
Where: LACMA
When: Oct. 18- Jan. 24, 2027
Price: $25 for L.A. County residents, otherwise $30
For more than two decades, the gallery served as a vital cultural hub, staging exhibitions, festivals, concerts, literary events and more. Named after the brothers’ maternal grandmother, born enslaved, the Brockman Gallery was a flourishing, ongoing act of self-determination in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. It showcased Black artists whose opportunities were severely limited at mainstream, white-run institutions and galleries: David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, John Outterbridge, Elizabeth Catlett, Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy and many more. More than 60 works by artists associated with the gallery will be included in this first full-scale consideration of the Brockman’s scope and impact.
Where: LACMA
When: Oct. 18- Jan. 24, 2027
Price: $25 for L.A. County residents, otherwise $30
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