This month, we’re highlighting a number of reveals that provide sorely wanted historic views on artwork in Los Angeles. Famend print writer Gemini G.E.L., as an example, presents a four-decade survey of prints by Robert Rauschenberg, showcasing their longtime collaboration that pushed the boundaries of printmaking. A present of not often seen works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez affords new insights into this famed Mexican muralist, who spent the final 15 years of his life in LA and left an unfinished mural at Scripps School when he died in 1946. Act on It! on the Vincent Value Artwork Museum pays homage to the Brockman Gallery, a pioneering hub for Black artwork and artists in South LA, whereas TJ Shin repurposes an air raid siren, as soon as a standard characteristic all through the town, to hint networks of migration and militarism. The 2-venue exhibition Monuments, although not targeted on LA, is a profoundly shifting investigation into the ways in which artwork displays the narratives and fictions we inform ourselves about who we’re as a nation.
Puppies Puppies: Forbidden Colours (Free)(Palestine)(Sudan) | Transgender Abstraction to Transgender Conceptualism
Ceradon, 1933 West Kingston Place, Echo Park, Los AngelesThrough December 6
Set up view of Puppies Puppies: Forbidden Colours (Free) (Palestine) (Sudan) (picture courtesy the artist and Ceradon Gallery)
Throughout two associated exhibitions, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) makes use of shade, gentle, and textual content to replicate on modern struggles for liberation. With a nod to the title of Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal 1988 art work, Forbidden Colours (Free)(Palestine)(Sudan) options three partitions painted inexperienced, white, and crimson — the colours of the Palestinian and Sudanese flags — with the phrase “Free” emblazoned in neon. Transgender Abstraction to Transgender Conceptualism enhances this with monochrome pink, blue, and white work with the identical dimensions because the stripes on the transgender flag, basically turning the gallery right into a monumental declaration of freedom and human rights. In line with Puppies Puppies’s frequent pairing of the poetic and the sensible, the reveals’ press launch can be up to date with sources for contributing to Palestinian, Sudanese, and Congolese support.
Pintor de Poemas: Unseen Works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps School, 251 East eleventh Road, Claremont, CaliforniaThrough December 14
Alfredo Ramos Martínez, “El Defensor/The Protector” (c. 1932), Conté crayon and tempera on newsprint (Los Angeles Instances, June 5, 1932) (© The Alfredo Ramos Martínez Analysis Undertaking; picture courtesy Louis Stern Effective Arts)
Pintor de Poemas presents greater than two dozen works by Alfredo Ramos Martínez, many on view for the primary time, providing new views on this pivotal determine within the growth of Mexican Modernism. As director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico Metropolis, now a part of Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico, he established open-air portray colleges that might show influential for subsequent generations of muralists. In 1929, he moved to Los Angeles, the place he gathered a following in Hollywood and created a number of public artworks together with “Las Vendedoras de Flores” (1935–38) at Scripps School, a mural left unfinished upon his dying in 1946. The exhibition contains research for that mural, in addition to different drawings and work that replicate themes of labor, political battle, and Indigeneity.
Robert Rauschenberg at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating 4 A long time of Innovation and Collaboration
Gemini G.E.L., 8365 Melrose Avenue, Beverly Grove, Los AngelesThrough December 19
Robert Rauschenberg, “L.A. Uncovered #12” (1998), 16-color screenprint, version of 64 (picture courtesy Gemini G.E.L.)
Robert Raschenberg was one of many first artists to work with now-legendary LA print writer Gemini G.E.L., having made his first print there one yr after its founding in 1966. This present covers 4 a long time of their fruitful collaborations, illustrating how they pushed printmaking in new instructions collectively. Greater than 50 works are on view, together with their first collaboration, “Booster” (1967), a six-foot tall print composed of x-rays of Rauschenberg’s physique; the Cardbirds sequence from 1971, which mimicked the look and texture of cardboard bins; and L.A. Uncovered (1998), a sequence of vivid screenprints in homage to the town. A concurrent companion exhibition can be held by Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl in New York.
Kathleen Ryan: Memento
Karma, 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CaliforniaThrough December 20
Kathleen Ryan, “Big Raspberry” (2025), malachite, lapis lazuli, amazonite, aventurine, turquoise, magnesite, amethyst, serpentine, quartz, stalagtite, stalagmite, fluorite, azurite, coral chalcedony, larimar, and calcite (© Kathleen Ryan; picture courtesy the artist and Karma)
Together with her monumental, bejeweled sculptures of rotting fruit, Kathleen Ryan is a grasp of balancing the off-putting and the opulent, the engaging and the repellent. Memento options two new our bodies of labor that mark an evolution in her use of supplies, but share the visceral and charged associations for which she is understood. On the middle of three cast-concrete peaches sit automobile engines instead of pits, metal and chrome contrasting with the sculpture’s natural curves. In one other sequence, Ryan enlarges low-cost plastic rings, recreating their kinds out of soda cans and bowling balls, giving literal weight to those seemingly inconsequential childhood trinkets.
Sabrina Gschwandtner: Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Selection
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 5247 West Adams Boulevard, West Adams, Los AngelesNovember 1–January 10, 2026
Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Madame’s Cravings (Red Diamond)” (2025), 35mm b/w polyester movie, polyester thread, etching ink, and LEDs (picture courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery)
Sabrina Gschwandtner’s sewn and coloured 35mm movie quilts draw from cinematic historical past to supply examples of ladies’s independence and bodily autonomy for a post-Roe world. Satirically, she discover these precedents in two early movies from a pre-Roe world directed by girls: Alice Man-Blaché’s “Madame’s Cravings” (1906), during which a pregnant lady steals whereas her companion minds the kid, and a 1931 documentary concerning the Frontier Nursing Service, which introduced healthcare to girls in rural Appalachia by horseback. Alongside her cinematic constructions, Gschwandtner presents an archival video and textual content undertaking targeted on her mom, who obtained an unlawful abortion earlier than the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade.
Nevena Prijić: Three Moments of an Explosion
Ochi, 605 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los AngelesNovember 1–January 10, 2026
Nevena Prijić, “In Pools and Caves” (2025), oil on canvas (photograph Ruben Diaz, courtesy the artist and OCHI)
Nevena Prijić’s enigmatic abstractions resemble artifacts from the scientific world: tiny lifeforms glimpsed by means of a microscope or celestial our bodies adrift within the cosmos. They’re, actually, the results of a scientific strategy of inventive discovery, starting as drawings on mylar sheets. Prijić then layers and arranges the transparencies, images them, and initiatives them onto the canvas, earlier than meticulously rendering the brand new compositions in oil paint. These evocative and perplexing work invite exploration into their origins, however don’t readily reveal their secrets and techniques.
Lee Lozano: Onerous Handshake
Hauser & Wirth, 901 East third Road, Downtown, Los AngelesOctober 30–January 18
Lee Lozano, “No title” (1962), graphite on paper (© The Property of Lee Lozano; photograph Barbora Gerny, courtesy Hauser & Wirth)
Lee Lozano was a fiercely unbiased and wildly mercurial artist who explored conceptual artwork, Minimalism, Surrealism, and feminist artwork, earlier than withdrawing from the artwork world utterly across the time of her 1971 Whitney Museum present. Onerous Handshake collects over 100 drawings made between 1959 and 1968, showcasing an necessary factor of her numerous apply. Starting with early self-portraits, the drawings vary from cartoonish depictions of genitalia and different physique elements to expressionistic renderings of business instruments and airplanes, typically suffused with a libidinal vitality.
Act on It! Artists, Neighborhood, and the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles
Vincent Value Artwork Museum, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CaliforniaThrough January 18, 2026
Jacob Lawrence, “The 1920’s…The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots” (1974) (© 2025 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Basis, Seattle Artwork)
The Brockman Gallery (1967–1990) was an important point of interest for Black artists in Los Angeles, offering a spot for them to indicate outdoors the slim confines of the mainstream artwork world. Based simply two years after the Watts Rise up of 1965 by brothers Dale Brockman Davis and Alonzo Davis, who handed away earlier this yr, the gallery exhibited work by David Hammons, Betye Saar, Charles White, Carrie Mae Weems, and plenty of others. Act On It! contains dozens of works by Brockman Gallery artists from LACMA’s assortment, highlighting its historic significance and ongoing legacy. The exhibition is a part of the Artwork Bridges Cohort program, by means of which LACMA has shaped an art-sharing partnership with seven Southern California establishments, together with the Vincent Prince Artwork Museum. The exhibition will journey to LACMA within the fall of 2026.
TJ Shin: Songs of Rising Endangerment
Los Angeles State Historic Park, 1315 North Spring Road, Chinatown, Los AngelesThrough February 22
Set up view of TJ Shin: Songs of Rising Endangerment (photograph Gina Clyne, courtesy Clockshop)
From World Battle II by means of the Chilly Battle, a whole lot of air raid sirens stood guard all through Los Angeles, sounding a check alarm as soon as every week. Although the system was shut down within the Nineteen Eighties, a few hundred silent sentinels nonetheless dot the streets of the town. TJ Shin’s sound set up Songs of Rising Endangerment repurposes one in every of these sirens to play hen calls. Shin requested 50 contributors to mimic calls of endangered migratory birds, after which in a second spherical, to repeat these interpretations. The ensuing patterns of name and response sound hourly from nightfall to daybreak all through the present’s run, overlaying techniques of migration and communication with these primarily based on militarism and concern.
MONUMENTS
The Geffen Up to date on the Museum of Up to date Artwork, 152 North Central Avenue, Downtown, Los AngelesThe Brick, 518 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los AngelesThrough Might 3, 2026
Set up view of Monuments at MOCA Geffen, with Laura Gardin Fraser’s “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson” (1948) on left and Hank Willis Thomas’s “A Suspension of Hostilities” (2019) on proper (photograph Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Public monuments have been central to present debates over race, historical past, and illustration. Virtually 200 US monuments, lots of them celebrating Accomplice historical past, have been decommissioned and brought down over the previous decade, although the Trump administration has taken steps towards re-erecting some. The 2-venue present Monuments options a number of of those sculptures and statues, a few of which bear the marks of vandalism and protest whereas others retain their patina. At MOCA Geffen, these are offered alongside current and newly commissioned work by modern artists together with Karon Davis, Hank Willis Thomas, and the late Nona Faustine, who supply nuanced and sometimes troublesome reconsiderations of our collective previous. Particularly shifting is the quick movie “HomeGoing” (2025) by Davóne Tines and Julie Sprint, an elegiac musical tribute to those that have been killed within the 2015 mass capturing at Mom Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. On view on the Brick, Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone” (2023) reassembles a bronze monument to Accomplice common Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson that the nonprofit acquired in 2021, scrambling the facile, heroic narratives embedded in these statues.
