Befitting the season, this month brings exhibitions that allow the boundaries between artwork and life, and life and demise, to fade away. A retrospective of the work of grasp altarista Ofelia Esparza showcases her iconic altars that helped popularize Día de los Muertos in america. A slideshow of radical nun Corita Kent’s pictures highlights her artistic course of, whereas Claire Chambless’s gothic dollhouses tackle an otherworldly lifetime of their very own. An exhibition of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s early work exhibits him transferring off the wall into the gallery house, the border-hopping enterprise Tacto brings artists from Baja California to LA for a cultural alternate that resists xenophobic authoritarianism, and extra.
Cameron Harvey: Gathering
Official Welcome, 672 South La Fayette Park Place, Suite 46, Westlake, Los AngelesThrough October 25
Cameron Harvey, “Ancestor 50” (2025) (photograph by David Daigle, courtesy the artist and Official Welcome, Los Angeles)
Cameron Harvey collects vegetation and flowers throughout day by day walks round LA, grounding her work in her personal expertise of nature. Drawing inspiration from the colours and types of the objects she accumulates, she lays unstretched, formed canvases on the ground and strikes moist paint round along with her physique. The ensuing biomorphic abstractions straddle portray and sculpture, hinting at new types of natural life simply starting to take root.
Frank Romero: California Dreaming
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, 1110 Mateo Avenue, Downtown, Los AngelesThrough October 25
Frank Romero, “Saucers Seen Over Hollywood” (2025) (picture courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles)
California Dreaming presents new work by pioneering Chicano artist Frank Romero alongside a collection of iconic older works from his six-decade profession. The exhibition contains work in addition to wooden and neon sculptures that painting quintessentially LA components he returns to repeatedly: freeways and landmarks, palm timber, cacti and different desert natural world, and the ever-present car. Into these scenes, he has added a brand new motif: alien craft, which signify each a Hollywood nostalgia and an allusion to rising xenophobia. These works are accompanied by new still-lifes of objects Romero has gathered on his travels, highlighting the wealthy cultural nexus he pulls from.
Claire Chambless: Spleen
Morán Morán, 641 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los AngelesThrough October 25
Claire Chambless, “Ghost Complex IV” (2025) (photograph courtesy the artist and Morán Morán)
Claire Chambless’s haunting dollhouses eschew youthful innocence, as an alternative conveying psychological complexity and bodily decay. Composed of wooden, resin, latex, and artificial hydroxyapatite — a fabric that mimics bone — her gothic dwellings appear to tackle a lifetime of their very own, as their natural kinds bulge, droop, and department off into new appendages. Incorporating discovered objects into her constructed environments, Chambless conjures up worlds of darkish fantasy, whilst the inside areas of her abodes harbor opaque secrets and techniques.
Hélio Oiticica
Lisson Gallery, 1037 North Sycamore Avenue, Hollywood, Los AngelesThrough November 1
Hélio Oiticica, “Spatial Relief Amarelo 22” (1959/2012) (© César and Claudio Oiticica; photograph courtesy Lisson Gallery)
Hélio Oiticica was some of the influential Brazilian artists of the Sixties and ’70s, a key determine in each Neo-Concretism and Tropicália, a motion that takes its identify from his 1967 set up. This exhibition focuses on his work from the late Fifties, adolescence that prefigured his immersive environments that marked a dissolution of the excellence between artwork and life. Featured work contains gouaches, one uncommon oil portray from his geometric Metaesquemas sequence (1957–58), and examples of his Revelos Espaciais or Spatial Reliefs, constructions of painted picket planes suspended from the ceiling that mark his first experimentations with house.
Karl Benjamin: A Centennial Exhibition
Louis Stern Superb Arts, 9002 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CaliforniaThrough November 1
Karl Benjamin, “Sailboat” (1956), oil on canvas (© Property of Karl Benjamin; photograph by Christian Nguyen, courtesy Louis Stern Superb Arts)
Karl Benjamin was among the many founders of the Laborious Edge Portray motion, a West Coast variant of post-painterly abstraction that additionally included Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. Timed with the one centesimal anniversary of his start, this exhibition brings collectively Benjamin’s work from the Fifties, produced earlier than the seminal 1959 present 4 Summary Classicists, curated by critic Jules Langsner, that marked the start of the Laborious Edge motion. The work on view hint the artist’s experimentation with varied kinds resembling expressionism and cubism — developmental steps resulting in the crisp, cool type that finally turned his hallmark.
TACTO: Dialogues of Separation and Union
Social and Public Artwork Useful resource Heart (SPARC), 685 North Venice Boulevard, Venice, CaliforniaThrough November 1
Valentina Sepúlveda, “Losing My Mind en las Calles del Norte” (2022) (picture courtesy SPARC)
Tacto is a binational mission targeted on resistance, resilience, and cultural dialogue between SPARC’s Durón Gallery in Los Angeles and Centro Estatal de las Artes (CEART) Tecate in Baja California, Mexico. SPARC’s portion options 10 artists from Baja California whose work throughout portray, video, images, textile, and efficiency explores land and id. Taking part artists embrace Mely Barragán, celeste hernández, Raúl Rodríguez Valenzuela, Valentina Sepúlveda, and others.
Luis Jiménez: American Dream
Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove Avenue and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CaliforniaThrough November 8
Luis Jiménez, “Rodeo Queen” (1972), fiberglass (picture courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles)
The late artist Luis Jiménez is greatest recognized for his fiberglass sculptures that draw on Pop Artwork, automotive tradition, and his Mexican-American heritage. With sensuous curves, brilliant colours, and gleaming surfaces, Jiménez explored and subverted the mythologies of the American West by depicting ladies’s our bodies, muscular vehicles, cowboys, horses, and weapons of warfare, typically in the identical work. American Dream, the primary solo presentation of his work in LA in over 4 a long time, options 14 sculptures, work, and drawings made between 1968 and 1997.
Suchitra Mattai: Fables, Guineps and the Sweetness of Unknowing
Roberts Tasks, 442 South La Brea Avenue, Hancock Park, Los AngelesThrough November 15
Suchitra Mattai, “a full heart” (2023–25) (photograph by Paul Salveson, courtesy the artist and Roberts Tasks, Los Angeles)
Suchitra Mattai plucks components from varied artwork historic references — from European portraiture to South Asian miniatures — and transforms them to discover how tradition is shared and constructed by migration and colonialism. At Roberts Tasks, she incorporates embroidery, needlepoint, and beading, all craft methods drawn from her Indo-Caribbean heritage. Utilizing the narrative construction of the fable as a conceptual framework, Mattai unites these disparate components by a brand new type of storytelling.
Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Photographs
Marciano Artwork Basis, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Metropolis, Los AngelesThrough January 24, 2026
Corita Kent, “Corita (Sister Mary Corita, IHM) and Sister Magdalen Mary, IHM, Paris, France” (1959), 35 mm slide (picture courtesy Corita Artwork Heart)
Radical nun Corita Kent is greatest recognized for her vibrant screenprints that mixed points of widespread tradition, spirituality, and social justice with experimental typography and graphic immediacy. As an avid photographer, she used her digital camera to file supply materials and design inspiration, doc the indicators and streetscapes of LA, and chronicle life at Immaculate Coronary heart Faculty, the place she taught artwork. The Sorcery of Photographs culls work from an archive of over 15,000 35mm slides taken by Kent and her colleagues between 1955 and 1968, from which curators Hanneke Skerath and Douglas Fogle chosen 1,100 photos. Offered as a three-screen digital projection, the exhibition gives insights into Kent’s follow, juxtaposing photos in ways in which prolong her legacy of tireless curiosity.
Ofelia Esparza: A Retrospective
Vincent Value Artwork Museum, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CaliforniaOctober 18–April 18, 2026
Ofelia Esparza in entrance of “Mictlan Sur” (2000), an altar at Self Assist Graphics & Artwork (picture courtesy the artist)
Grasp altarista Ofelia Esparza has helped popularize the Mexican custom of altar-making — honoring deceased family members by momentary memorials composed of pictures, flowers, meals, and different symbolic choices — in america over the previous a number of a long time. A local of East Los Angeles, Esparza is a sixth-generation altar-maker and started crafting public altars in 1979 on the neighborhood artwork middle Self-Assist Graphics, the place she additionally took up printmaking. This retrospective recreates a few of her most memorable altars alongside different art work and archival materials, tracing a seven-decade profession that has intersected with main actions for social justice and civil rights.
