After the recent frenzy of Art Week here in Los Angeles, this month’s selections focus on community and collaboration, tracing historical and personal networks of connection. Wael Shawky’s film Drama 1882 is a stylized opera based on an anti-colonial uprising in Egypt, a fanciful mix of fact and fiction. Kour Pour’s first LA show in over a decade fuses geometric modernism with Islamic design, reflecting his diasporic identity. An exhibition and performance program at REDCAT looks at the creative synergy between experimental musicians Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell, while solo shows from Kim Ye and Isabel Yellin draw on their autobiographical experiences as women and artists, albeit in distinct ways. Simón Silva’s bold canvases honor the farmworkers, housekeepers, and landscapers whose essential labor often goes unacknowledged.
Wael Shawky: Drama 1882
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 North Central Avenue, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles
Through March 16
Egyptian-born artist Wael Shawky’s film Drama 1882 (2024) is an eight-part opera based around the 19th-century Urabi Revolution, a nationalist Egyptian uprising against British and French colonial powers. Mixing historical accounts and fictional narratives, Shawky focuses on a single cafe brawl during this larger conflict, and how its reverberations played out over the next 70 years. Filmed at a historic theater in Alexandria, the opera is sung entirely in classical Arabic and features sets and costumes reminiscent of German Expressionist cinema. Originally presented at the Egyptian Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale, MOCA’s presentation marks the film’s United States debut.
Kim Ye: m0mmy brain marketplace
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, 315 Palm Avenue, Orange, California
Through March 20
M0mmy brain marketplace is Kim Ye’s irreverent interrogation of various forms of labor, from the unpaid and often unrecognized labor of motherhood to the capitalist structure of the art world. Featuring sculpture, painting, video, and live performance, the exhibition reflects the artist’s own experiences navigating these systems, the staged drama of reality television, and a vulnerable eroticism. On Sunday, March 16, Ye will perform “A Costco Shopper Analysis,” which the artist describes as a “standup comedy/academic lecture/TED talk” in which she takes on the role of a demographically typical customer of the big box retailer to comment on immigration, consumption, and family.
Kour Pour: Finding My Way Home
Nazarian / Curcio, 616 North La Brea Avenue, Fairfax, Los Angeles
Through March 22
Finding My Way Home, Kour Pour’s first solo show in the city in over 10 years, features stacked and layered paintings that reflect his diasporic identity as an artist of Iranian and British descent living in LA. Fusing geometric abstraction with elements from Persian miniature painting and Islamic design, Pour’s constructed paintings weave together threads of autobiography and global history, of his family’s travels and geopolitical or art historical events, such as Frank Stella’s 1963 trip to Iran. In conjunction with the show, Pour has curated a concurrent group exhibition, Mehmooni, with work by LA-based Iranian artists Shagha Ariannia, Amir H. Fallah, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Aryana Minai, and others.
Simón Silva: Salt of the Earth
Eastern Projects, 900 North Broadway, #1090, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Through March 22
Mexican-American artist Simón Silva’s paintings of farmworkers, domestic workers, paleteros, and landscapers bring a vibrant visibility to the essential workers, mainly Latinx, whose labor often goes unnoticed. Silva casts housekeepers as La Virgen de Guadalupe, enclosed within sacred mandalas, and paints portraits of migrant workers on fruit crates, their faces covered with hats and bandanas so leaving only their expressive eyes visible. Paleteros push their carts against the backdrop of drab freeways and tunnels, solitary figures with stray dogs as their only companions. In the over 40 paintings included in Salt of the Earth, Silva depicts these laborers with a sense of respect and honesty, honoring their humanity while capturing the arduous and often perilous nature of their daily realities.
Isabel Yellin: Mothership
Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, California
Through March 30
Isabel Yellin’s first museum show features undulating silicone paintings and sinuous metal-and-silicone sculptures, jumbles of tangled lines that vibrate with energetic tension. The works across Motherhood have deep psychological roots, as well, functioning as a way for Yellin to process her grief over the death of her mother, Anne Locksley, who took her own life in 2008. She began this series shortly after rediscovering her mother’s own paintings. The exhibition beautifully brings together work by both mother and daughter, setting up a moving creative dialogue between the two.
Flesh World: Monica Berger and Sofia Heftersmith
Central Server Works DTLA, 334 Main Street, Suite 5012, Downtown, Los Angeles
March 8–April 12
Flesh World gathers paintings by Monica Berger and Sofia Heftersmith, two artists who take on traditional depictions of the female form with a nod to so-called “lowbrow” aesthetics and mass media symbolism. Heftersmith draws on classic pin-ups, sideshow posters, and religious iconography, reveling in the grotesque and corporeal, while Berger’s women straddle New Wave and Fauvism, their neon-hued bodies marked by tattoos and theatrical makeup. Taken together, their work offers confident, compelling visions of femininity that complicate simple voyeuristic pleasure.
40th Anniversary Exhibition
Michael Kohn Gallery, 1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through April 19
Michael Kohn’s eponymous gallery has been a fixture of the Hollywood art scene since its founding in 1985 and relocation to Highland Avenue in 2014. He opened with an exhibition of artists from New York, but has since established a broad roster, with several notable LA artists including Lita Albuquerque, Wallace Berman, Joe Goode, and Chiffon Thomas. This 40th anniversary exhibition features work by a wide selection of artists who have exhibited at the gallery, such as Keith Haring, Alicia Adamerovich, Martha Alf, Kenny Scharf, Gonzalo Lebrija, and many others. The show will also include the premiere of the restored version of Bruce Conner’s film “The White Rose” (1967), documenting the extraction of Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting “The Rose” (1958–1966) through the window of her San Francisco apartment.
Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years
Marian Goodman Gallery, 1120 Seward Street, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through April 26
Bruce Nauman lived in Los Angeles — first at the Pasadena home of Walter Hopps, and then in Altadena — between 1969 and ’79, an incredibly productive time early on in his career. Pasadena Years presents a selection of sculptures, installations, sound works, video, and works on paper, highlighting Nauman’s expansive conception of the possibilities of artmaking during this especially formative period. Notable works include “Revolving Upside Down” (1969), a video of the artist performing simple actions; “Microphone/Tree Piece” (1971), which transmits the sound of a tree growing into the gallery; and architectural installations that invite viewer participation, such as “Performance Corridor” (1969), and a recreation of “Text for a Room” (1973–2025).
World of Echo: Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell
REDCAT, 631 West 2nd Street, Downtown, Los Angeles
March 15–May 4
World of Echo is an exhibition and performance series that explores connections between two wildly influential figures in experimental music: Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell. Featuring audio, video, and other archival materials, the show looks at the various collaborations between the two from 1975 until their untimely deaths in 1990 and 1992, respectively, and how their compositions spanning classical to jazz to disco embodied themes of liberation. A trio of performances from orchestral collective Wild Up brings their groundbreaking music back to life.
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men
Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles
Through May 25
The Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte is remembered for his paintings that depicted everyday French life with a notable air of realism. Painting Men homes in on one facet of his practice, showcasing his depictions of male figures. With images of working men, young professionals, cafe scenes, and family and friends, the exhibition argues that Caillebotte was portraying modern forms of masculinity that exemplified a break with traditional norms of the era.
