Fall is a busy time in the art world, as galleries regroup after summer break and museums unveil new blockbuster exhibitions. But this season brings added excitement in Los Angeles, with the kick-off of PST ART: Art & Science Collide marking the latest chapter in the Getty’s sprawling PST initiative taking place at over 70 venues all over the Southland. Several participating exhibitions are included below, but there are still quite a few shows beyond the program that are well worth a visit. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting the first retrospective of the work of 95-year-old ceramicist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess at LACMA, with other invigorating shows around the city such as a survey of Christina Ramberg’s hard-edged eroticism at the Hammer Museum, Fred Tomaselli’s dazzling painted and collaged works at the Laguna Art Museum, and Raqib Shaw’s painstakingly detailed scenes taking their cue from history paintings and ornament traditions from across the world.
Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation
USC Fisher Museum of Art, 823 Exposition Boulevard, University Park, Los Angeles
Through November 23
This group show organized by the ONE Archives and presented at the University of California’s Fisher Museum explores the intersection of science fiction, the occult, and LGBTQ+ communities in Los Angeles during the mid-20th century. Writers, artists, and leagues of fans were fascinated by the visionary and arcane imagined worlds full of new possibilities, including queer liberation. The exhibition harkens back to this transformative era from the late 1930s to ’60s through a rich array of film, photography, illustration, costumes, and music by Kenneth Anger, Marjorie Cameron, Renate Druks, Curtis Harrington, and Jim Kepner, among others.
Lumen: The Art and Science of Light
Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles
September 10–December 8
In Medieval Europe, light was both a symbol of the divine and a subject of scientific investigation, linking heaven and earth. Lumen examines how the phenomenon was studied and represented by artists, scientists, and theologians from Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. Manuscripts, paintings, tapestries, and scientific and liturgical objects will be shown alongside contemporary artworks that bend, reflect, and refract light by Helen Pashgian, Charles Ross, Fred Eversley, and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.
Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism
The Brick, 518 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
September 15–December 21
The Ecofeminist movement emerged in the US during the late 1970s, with a strong focus on the links between environmental issues and gender inequality. Life on Earth expands on these initial concerns to explore a wide range of interwoven themes covering Indigenous knowledge, lesbian separatism, speculative futures, and witchcraft. Participating artists include ecofeminist pioneers and those who have been inspired by their work, including Carolina Caycedo’s multi-media practice revealing the disastrous effects of resource extraction on Indigenous communities in Colombia, a video work by the Institute of Queer Ecology that proposes alternatives to exploitative capitalism, and the late Masumi Hayashi’s photographic landscapes documenting the environmental impact on areas around contaminated Ohio Superfund sites.
L.A. Story
Hauser and Wirth West Hollywood, 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, California
September 12–January 4, 2025
The 1991 romantic comedy LA Story follows discontented TV weatherman Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) as he tries to find love amidst the magic, madness, and mundanity of Los Angeles. Co-organized by Ingrid Schaffner and Mike Davis in conjunction with Martin, who is a longtime art collector, this exhibition draws inspiration from the film by featuring artists who portray aspects of the city’s multifarious narratives in their work. Participating artists include David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Mark Bradford, Vija Celmins, Florian Maier-Aichen, and Calida Rawles, among others.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles
Through January 5, 2025
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess is perhaps best known for her ceramic work that flow from a range of sources including Aztec imagery, Disney characters, ancient Greek pottery, and modernist abstraction. The Finest Disregard is the 95-year-old, LA-based, Venezuelan-born artist’s first solo museum show, showcasing over five decades of her paintings, drawings, and ceramics, as well as a section devoted to collaborations with her husband Michael Frimkess. Highlighting her humor and whimsy alongside her varied art historical and autobiographical references, this exhibition conveys the breadth of a singularly influential career.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles
October 12–January 5, 2025
Christina Ramberg’s paintings depict fragmented female bodies, usually torsos, corseted or bound in a manner that conjures traditional female beauty standards as much as bondage fetish wear. The late artist was associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists who formed in the late 1960s, united by a shared affinity for Surrealism, Pop Art, and underground comics. With cold, hard-edged precision, her canvases present a vision of female eroticism that is inaccessible and malevolent. Featuring roughly 100 paintings, quilts, and archival material, this is the first retrospective of her work since a survey of her drawings in Chicago in 2000.
Fred Tomaselli: Second Nature
Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, California
October 2–February 2, 2025
Fred Tomaselli’s deliriously decorative hybrid works are composed of leaves, pills, and other pharmaceuticals; collaged photographs and text; and hand-painted elements, all encased in layers of clear resin. The results, which mix the real in with the illusionistic and ornamental, are mesmerizing and unsettling at the same time. Second Nature juxtaposes Tomaselli’s resin works with recent examples from his ongoing New York Times series, in which he alters the newspaper’s front pages via gouache and collage, offering surreal commentary on current events.
ARTEONICA*: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today
Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach, California
September 22–February 23, 2025
Brazilian artist, critic, landscape designer, and theorist Waldemar Cordeiro believed that technology could be a tool for democratizing society and culture. He shared his ideas in a 1971 treatise and exhibition at the Museu de Arte Brasileira de la Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo, called ARTEONICA* — a portmanteau of arte and electrónica, “art” and “electronic” in Spanish — that would influence other artists throughout Latin America. This exhibition features early computer artists of the 1960s and 1970s alongside contemporary artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru who continue to explore the role that technology can play in progressive social change.
Scientia Sexualis
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1717 East 7th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles
October 5–March 2, 2025
The 25 artists and duos in Scientia Sexualis investigate how sex and gender have historically been classified through science, and imagine radical new ways to define them. Lingering at the intersection of the sexualized body and forces of colonialism, racism, and pathologization, they reclaim the language of medicine and experimentation in service of a more inclusive vision. Featured artists include Panteha Abareshi, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Xandra Ibarra, Candice Lin, Joey Terrill, and others.
Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California
November 16–March 3, 2025
Raqib Shaw’s fantastical paintings envision a fusion of European, Asian, Southwest African, and North African influences, drawing on traditions including European Renaissance paintings, Persian miniatures, Japanese prints, and Indian textile designs. He crafts meticulous scenes with enamel paint on birch panels, using porcupine quills to render minute details and precise ornamental patterns. Seven paintings by Shaw will be exhibited in the Huntington’s collection gallery, placing his work in dialogue with historical European masterworks.
Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature
The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles
November 16–April 6, 2025
German artist Joseph Beuys’ political and environmental concerns take center stage in this exhibition, which highlights their suffusion in his well-known multiples. In Defense of Nature will gather over 400 works, including “Sled” (1969), “Felt Suit” (1970), and a simple glass bottle of contaminated river water titled “Rhine Water Polluted” (1981), to underscore his economy of means in bringing attention to global issues. A reforestation project inspired by Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), a performance and installation that involved the planting of 7,000 trees to commemorate the trauma of WWII, will also accompany the show. In collaboration with members of the local Tongva community, 100 California native oak trees will be planted in Elysian Park in acknowledgment of the long history and resilience of the Tongva people.
Olafur Eliasson: OPEN
Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 152 North Central Avenue, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles
September 15–July 6, 2025
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson created this site-specific installation, slated to open to the public in mid-September, as a response to the architecture and space of the Geffen Contemporary. The exhibition will comprise objects and devices that employ light, optics, and geometry to transform the museum’s cavernous space into a theater of perceptual delight.
Mark Dion: Excavations
La Brea Tar Pits, 5801 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
September 15–September 15, 2025
Grounded in research, Mark Dion’s practice pulls back the curtain on museum storage areas and archives, displaying elements of museology that are often intentionally hidden from public view. Excavations is the fruit of his recent residency at the La Brea Tar Pits and combines murals, dioramas, and models from its collection with new artworks by Dion. The centerpiece is Dion’s monumental sculpture of a pack rat skeleton fossil, which is accompanied by drawings of mammal skeletons often found in the pits and labeled with significant Angeleno names and places, layering the prehistoric with the contemporary.
Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
October 6–April 12, 2026
The cyberpunk branch of science fiction imagines a dystopian future in which humans in sprawling megalopolises must contend with environmental crises, social repression, and domination by AI. This exhibition showcases cyberpunk in cinema, featuring costumes, props, and art from genre classics including Blade Runner (1982) and eXistenZ (1999); animated films Akira (1988) and Ghost in the Shell (1995); and more recent examples that incorporate themes of race, indigeneity, and post-colonialism such as Neptune Frost (2021), Alita: Battle Angel (2019), and Night Raiders (2021).
Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology
Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, Los Angeles
September 7–June 21, 2026
Future Imaginaries is a group show that explores Indigenous Futurism as a form of resistance and solidarity for Native peoples. The exhibition extends throughout the museum, creating challenging and thoughtful juxtapositions between contemporary artworks that call for a liberated future and historical examples of Western art from the Autry’s collection. Artists include Wendy Red Star, Virgil Ortiz, Andy Everson, Ryan Singer, and Neal Ambrose Smith.
