As we enter 2025, we cast off the old and welcome the new. Cyclicality suffuses LA’s art offerings this month, beginning with a career retrospective of Pippa Garner, that fearless artist who passed away on December 30 and leaves behind a legacy of constant change and evolution. Honor Fraser hosts a two-week exhibition of new work by Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder Pussy Riot, whose art is intertwined with her activism. In his photographic updates to monuments, Iván Argote challenges histories of colonialism, while Elizabeth Tremante’s blood-drenched canvases offer comic rejoinders to established art historical narratives. At Regen Projects, Doug Aitken juxtaposes California’s deep ecological time with its contemporary identities, offering glimpses of the future with a fitting recognition of what has come before.
Misc. Pippa: Pippa Garner
Stars, 3116 North El Centro Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through January 18
Transformation was a constant theme in Pippa Garner’s art and life, from her cheeky hybrid automobiles and furniture to her own gender evolution, which she began in the 1980s. Misc. Pippa is a two-venue survey of her boundary-breaking career, held at Stars in Los Angeles and Matthew Brown in New York. The LA iteration includes her first intentional artwork “Kar-mann” (1969), a meticulously crafted half-man, half-car sculpture complete with a hanging scrotum like a set of proto-truck nuts, alongside drawings, photographs, and other objects showcasing Garner’s subversive wit, whimsy, and material gusto. Garner sadly passed away on December 30 at the age of 82, making this bi-coastal exhibition a fitting tribute to her life and legacy.
Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific
Guggenheim Gallery, Moulton Hall, One University Drive & Packing Plant at Chapman University, 350 Cypress Street, Orange, California
Through January 19 (reopens January 6)
The Pacific Rim is one of the most volatile and dynamic regions on the planet, a hotbed of volcanic, tectonic, and tragically, nuclear activity. Energy Fields features artists from Japan, Australia, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the United States who explore how phenomena such as gravitational waves, the electromagnetic spectrum, geological vibrations, and sound inform our perception of the world. The exhibition, part of the Getty-organized initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide, includes sculpture, two-dimensional work, sonic environments, and installations by Steve Roden, Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, Alba Triana, Channing Hansen, Minoru Sato, and others.
Nadya Tolokonnikova – Pussy Riot: Punk’s Not Dead
Honor Fraser, 2622 South La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City, Los Angeles
January 10–25
Punk’s Not Dead is a solo show of new work by Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder of the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot. Coinciding with her residency at Honor Fraser, the exhibition features installations that reflect Tolokonnikova’s experiences of resistance and incarceration, alongside masked self-portraits in which her balaclava is rendered through calligraphic text. Throughout its two-week run, the show will host performances and musical events, reimagining itself as a site for communal protest and solidarity.
Iván Argote: Impermanent
Perrotin, 5036 West Pico Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Through January 25
Bogotá-born artist Iván Argote challenges colonial legacies through shrewd, striking interventions with monuments that champion these histories. Impermanent centers photographic and sculptural works made between 2012 and 2024, including his 2013 photo of a statue of King Charles III of Spain in downtown LA wearing an Indigenous poncho, a recognition of the communities who already lived in the area when the city was founded during his reign in 1781. Argote’s Etcetera series (2012–18), depicts a monument to Francisco de Orellana, the so-called “discoverer” of the Amazon, that Argote covered in mirrors to functionally replace him with the surrounding landscape. The exhibition also features his Wildflowers, Augustus series (2024), which repurposes sections of a replica bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Augustus as planters for native foliage.
Elizabeth Tremante: Final Girls
Serious Topics, 1207 North La Brea Avenue, Suite 300, Inglewood, California
January 4–February 8
In Elizabeth Tremante’s irreverent canvases, art historical depictions of femininity are confronted by real-world women, yielding comically violent results. Within serene museum galleries hung with her versions of Western masterworks, Tremante depicts women, girls, and families who bleed, vomit, cry, and otherwise defile these hallowed cultural institutions. Named for the horror film trope of the lone female survivor, Final Girls portrays a trip to the museum as a hysterically ferocious struggle between representation and reality.
Emily Marchand: The Slumber of a Prince
Ochi, 3301 West Washington Boulevard, Arlington Heights, Los Angeles
January 11–February 15
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Emily Marchand dealt with the isolation and grief of lockdown by focusing on two things that represented hope and connection: her garden and her dog, Ozzy. The Slumber of a Prince is replete with life-size ceramic sculptures of Ozzy in various states of joy and repose, his body covered in a cornucopia of colorful flowers, plants, and fried eggs. Accompanying glazed-tile wallworks depict canine forms floating through verdant vistas of flora and fauna. Created before Ozzy’s death last summer, these anticipatory memorials, though tinged with the pain of loss, celebrate a life well lived.
Marcus Leslie Singleton: Winter Atlantic Summer
The Journal Gallery, 9055 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, California
Through February 15
Marcus Leslie Singleton draws on his own life and personal experiences for the subject matter of his figurative paintings, which also offer insights into larger societal and cultural themes around race, gender, and sexual orientation. His first major solo show in LA features informal, candid scenes of Black life painted with loose brushwork and flat areas of colors, recalling the work of Jacob Lawrence, whom he cites as an early influence. Singleton’s paintings, however, channel an intimate specificity that sparks our curiosity, inviting us to ponder the narrative behind images of two young men on horseback, a goggled swimmer striking an Odalisque pose poolside, and a reclining artist painting a portrait of a seated model, both of them nude.
Doug Aitken: Psychic Debris Field
Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles
January 11–February 22
Through his films, sculptures, photographs, and audio works, Doug Aitken presents a dynamic, fragmented vision of contemporary life, specifically as it plays out amidst the contradictions of Southern California. Psychic Debris Field, his sixth show with Regen Projects, juxtaposes the region’s geological and ecological history with its veneer of artifice, obsolescence, and endless possibility. Notable works include a sculpture of the late, beloved mountain lion P-22 made from ocean debris, freeway rubber, organic matter, and seeds; a desert installation with steel cacti, bus stop, ice machine, and two stags locked in combat, their horns glowing; and tapestries depicting a mid-century house and pool that Aitken made while filming Lightscape, his cinematic and musical collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Master Chorale, currently on view at the Marciano Art Foundation.
Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968
Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles
Through May 4
Challenging the notion that Photorealism marked a representational dead end, Ordinary People features 40 artists working in the movement between the 1960s and today. Early practitioners in the exhibition include Vija Celmins, Audrey Flack, and Barkley L. Hendricks, alongside contemporary artists who continue their legacy, such as Michael Alvarez, Sayre Gomez, and Vincent Valdez. The show highlights Photorealism’s technical proficiency and meticulous verisimilitude, as well as its political and aesthetic role in depicting people and places historically omitted from artistic representation.
Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Through August 3
Imagining Black Diasporas takes an expansive view of contemporary Black art, featuring work by 60 artists from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, with a special focus on those based on the West Coast. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, photography, and video created over roughly the past 25 years, curated by Dhyandra Lawson and pulled primarily from the museum’s collection. Bringing together established artists including Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, Nick Cave, and Glenn Ligon with emerging artists and those likely lesser known to American audiences such as Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Ibrahim Mahama, and Grace Ndiritu, Imagining Black Diasporas showcases the breadth of Pan-African expressions of displacement, resilience, fusion, and reinvention.
