The key collaborator in any artwork is the viewer, a point foundational to Yoko Ono’s practice. We first encounter this notion just outside the door of The Broad in L.A., where “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” runs through Oct. 11. There, from the limbs of the century-old Barouni olive trees, hundreds of white tags hang like fruit. On them are written the wishes of passersby, completing her work, Wish Trees for Los Angeles (1996), in which viewers are invited to draw inspiration from the messages or add their own to uplift others.

“There are through lines from the very beginning where she’s asking us to look internally and find a sense of self, a sense of centeredness, and act from there with compassion towards others,” The Broad curator and exhibitions manager Sarah Loyer tells Observer of the show, which originated at the Tate Modern in 2024, noting that Ono sees the artist’s role as one of transforming consciousness.

Most famous in many circles for being John Lennon’s wife, Ono had a noteworthy career as an artist long before she met him. A fixture in New York’s avant-garde scene since the mid-1950s, her loft on Chambers Street was known for a series of concerts she curated with composer La Monte Young, attended by such luminaries as John Cage (with whom she toured Japan) and Isamu Noguchi. In 1961, her first major performance, at Carnegie Recital Hall, attended by Young, Richard Maxfield, Jonas Mekas, Yvonne Rainer and others, preceded her first solo art show, “Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono,” at AG Gallery owned by Fluxus guru George Maciunas, an early champion of her work.

Cut Piece (1964), first staged at Kyoto’s Yamaichi Hall, was a major breakthrough and remains her most resilient piece. In it, she sat on a stage beside a pair of shears while audience members were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing. “It was a form of giving, giving and taking,” she said of the work, which will be performed, along with Sky Piece to Jesus Christ, at L.A.’s REDCAT by artist MPA July 18 and 19. “It was a kind of criticism against artists, who are always giving what they want to give. I wanted people to take whatever they wanted to, so it was very important to say you can cut where you want to.”

“Cut Piece has been interpreted in a wide range of ways, often through aspects of identity—race, sex, gender, as well as nationality,” says Loyer, noting Ono staged it again in 2003 at age 70, commenting on ageism. “She first performed it in a sort of key post-war period, so it’s been read in relation to the traumas and after effects of World War II or the Vietnam War.”

In the first gallery at The Broad is Lighting Piece, a short black-and-white film taking a cue from Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit, a collection of 200 avant-garde “instruction pieces,” which says “light a match and watch till it goes out.” Her practice is mainly split between performance pieces like Cut Piece, Wrapping Piece and Shadow Piece, opposite works like White Chess Set (also known as Play It by Trust) (1966), a chess set with no black pieces, negating the concept of war and conflict and promoting cooperation between both sides. A Box of Smile (1967), a small sterling silver box with a mirror on the bottom, is related to an unrealized film meant to capture the smiling face of almost every person on the globe so that world leaders would see those who would be affected by declarations of war.

Other pieces straddle both sides of her practice, like Acorn Piece (1968), when Ono and Lennon planted two acorns (one facing East, one facing West) at Coventry Cathedral in England. Expanding the concept a year later, they mailed boxes containing acorns to 96 prominent world leaders, asking them to grow trees. Briefly banned by the British Board of Film Censors, her Film No. 4 (often referred to as “Bottoms”) (1967) is an 80-minute black-and-white piece consisting entirely of close-ups of human posteriors. “It would be very helpful if people started to take off their pants before they fight—that’s the sort of destruction I’m interested in,” Ono said at London’s 1966 DIAS (Destruction in Art Symposium), sponsored by avant-garde guru Gustav Metzger.

It was a pivotal time and place for her where she presented “Unfinished Paintings and Objects” at Indica Gallery, for which Maciunas provided mechanical designs and crucial support. That’s where she first met John Lennon, who asked to hammer a nail into her piece, Painting to Hammer a Nail. She initially refused because the exhibit hadn’t officially opened yet, but after some coaxing, she agreed to let him do so for five shillings. Lennon answered, “Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.” At the same show, he climbed the ladder of her piece Ceiling Painting, also at The Broad, and peered through a magnifying glass suspended on a chain to read the word “Yes” printed in tiny letters on the ceiling.

Collaborations between the two were mainly in the realm of protest and music. Their first, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, was released with a nude photo of the couple on its cover and was sold in a brown paper sleeve. Recorded at Lennon’s home studio while his wife at the time, Cynthia, was vacationing in Greece, it marked the end of his first marriage when she returned home to find Ono wearing her bathrobe and was greeted by her husband with the words, “Oh, hi.”

Revolution 9, on the Beatles’ White Album, was largely a collaboration between Lennon and Ono, along with George Harrison. Although it’s contractually credited to Lennon-McCartney, McCartney chafed at the song’s inclusion on the album. Ono is seen by many fans as the cause of the band’s breakup after Lennon insisted a bed be brought into Abbey Road studios so she could provide input after being immobilized during a car accident. But experts maintain the band was well on the way to dissolution despite Ono’s presence.

“It was like somebody who is in prison without having done anything wrong,” she said at the time. “I finally came to the conclusion to use that big energy of hatred that was coming to me and turn it around into love.”

“Together, they really focused on humanitarianism and peace efforts during the Vietnam War,” says Loyer about the pair’s ‘bed-in’ following their marriage in 1969, a nonviolent protest against war over a two-week period in Amsterdam and Montreal hotels in which the press was invited into their bedroom. While in Montreal, they recorded “Give Peace a Chance,” an anthem adopted by Vietnam War protesters, followed by their campaign War Is Over If You Want It, propagated through advertising and mass media in 12 cities internationally, and repeated around L.A. in conjunction with The Broad show.

Ono’s musical output was also prolific in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recording as a solo artist and with Lennon in the Plastic Ono Band. In addition to songs like “Sisters, Oh Sisters” and “Women Power,” her career continued long after Lennon’s death in 1980 with 16 solo albums to date.

At age 93, there’s no telling whether or not there will be a 17th, but coinciding with The Broad show is a September 19 workshop of a new musical, I Am Yoko, co-produced by Yuka Honda of the band Cibo Matto and artist Glenn Kaino. They will be accompanied by vocalists Theo Bleckmann, Ono’s granddaughter Emi Helfrich and cellist Maggie Parkins.

“Peace is the most difficult and complex state for humanity to achieve, as we live among an overwhelming number of people with whom we cannot agree,” Honda, a longtime friend of Ono’s, said in an Instagram post reflecting the artist’s career. “The challenge becomes unbearable when force is involved. Still, I hope we never take our eyes off this goal.”

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When Germany-based art gallery Sprüth Magers first set up shop in L.A. in March 2016, their timing was impeccable. They staked out a location directly across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and opened their doors a few weeks before Hauser & Wirth cut the ribbon on their Arts District location. Both arrived at a time when L.A. was on its way to becoming one of the country’s leading art destinations—only five years after the landmark show “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980” brought the city’s modern art history to the art world’s attention, highlighting L.A.-centric movements like Light and Space and Finish Fetish across some 60 institutions throughout the area.

But Sprüth Magers’ success here didn’t happen overnight. Its founders Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers spent decades building relationships with artists whose work would go on to define the L.A. scene—John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby and more. Today, Sprüth Magers has spaces in Berlin, London, New York City and Los Angeles, which marked the gallery’s first location in the United States. Celebrating their anniversary is “10 Years in LA!,” a group show of blue-chip artists from all over the world.

“I’m just so happy that the gallery is here,” Barbara Kruger tells Observer. She has three pieces in the show including Untitled (Our people are better than your people) from 1994/2024, Untitled (Hello), a sound installation from 2021, and Pledge, Will, Vow, a three-channel video installation from 1988/2020 that showed at the 1988 Venice Biennale. “The space is beautiful and wonderful. And the location is terrific. They have such an important program, with so many artists that I admire.”

The show includes the above-listed names as well as Kenneth Anger, Gilbert & George, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Gala Porras-Kim, David Salle, John Waters and many others. Kruger first started showing with Monika Sprüth in Cologne roughly 30 years ago, when women didn’t have a significant presence in the German art world. “Sort of white guys ruled, you know. But thanks to Monika, a group of women started showing their work in Germany, in Cologne. And that was incredibly important for me,” says Kruger about her beginnings with the gallery. “Together they formed this incredible roster of artists, both American and European men, women, and engaged issues of gender, but also race. Their program really reflects how the artworld has changed within the past twenty years. A much more inclusive place. When I was coming up, the so-called artworld seemed to be five white guys in lower Manhattan.”

One white guy from lower Manhattan in the show is George Condo, who contributed a recent piece entitled War of the Worlds. “Named after the H.G. Wells novel, it turned out to be the world we live in today,” Condo says of his abstract painting. “It represents fear and turmoil, desperation and insanity. It is also, amongst other things, a diagonal abstraction in a format reminiscent of a kind of landslide of humanity.”

Condo’s first solo show at the gallery was in 1984, one of many, including 2016’s Entrance to the Void, inspired by his bout with cancer and, two years later, What’s the Point?, named for a monochrome work depicting a jumble of TVs. “I thought, ‘What’s the point of following the news or thinking that whatever you had yesterday is going to be relevant tomorrow?’ I internalized the idea of it being about the making of art.”

In the early 1980s Condo spent time with his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat in Los Angeles, where the latter had his first show in a club called The Rhythm Lounge. The accompanying music was provided by a new band making their live debut, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “The early days I spent in Los Angeles were hysterical, having to get a job selling pens in some crazy pen sales office on Hollywood Boulevard to make enough money to get back to New York. And while I was doing that, Basquiat did that painting Hollywood Africans out there when Rammellzee and Toxic and all these graffiti guys came. He was preparing for his first show at Larry’s [Gagosian],” Condo recalls.

“He’s an artist with broad cultural knowledge, and broad knowledge about European art history,” Sprüth said of Condo at the time of Entrance to the Void. “He manages, with his knowledge and intellect, to bring it into a new form.”

Another white guy in the show is Sterling Ruby, whose SP is a new work that revisits his spray paint canvases from 2008-11, atmospheric abstracts reminiscent of the Color Field works of Mark Rothko. Confronted every day in his studio by the earlier canvases, Ruby was inspired by the ongoing war in Iran to revisit them. “I kept looking at these, thinking of this flat wasteland, these two kinds of eyes, these opposing zones and tears, kind of like rain falling, and wanting to allude to this spiritual aspect of it, not really heavenly, but maybe environmental.”

What first inspired him to use spray paint rather than oil was the street art and graffiti of L.A. Growing up in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, he yearned for a place like California, drawn to the Gold Rush of the 1860s, the rise of the entertainment business in the early part of the century, the hippie movement of the 1960s and the punk scene of the 1970s and ’80s.

“As an artist, I came out here because the art that was being made here seemed a lot more psychological and pathological,” he says, noting movements like Light and Space, and figures like Barbara Kruger, Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins. “Philomene and Monika, they’ve championed a lot of this particular art from this particular region. And I don’t think that that’s always been easy. To be part of that roster that shows and champions artists like Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Robert Morris, I think it’s historical, what they’ve built, and it’s very unique.”

Sprüth expressed a similar sentiment in a recent email, noting that such names are part of the reason they first decided to open a space in L.A., while Magers celebrated new developments in their mid-Wilshire neighborhood, including the newly opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. “New museums, new museum buildings, a new subway line,” she wrote. “You can really feel a different energy just walking down the street from the gallery.”

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For three generations, art lovers have been drawn to a residential corner in the Coyoacán section of Mexico City to visit Casa Azul, the house where Frida Kahlo was born, lived, loved and painted for over 40 years. Witness to a vibrant past, its cobalt walls enclose a courtyard and garden cooled by fountains and shady pathways. Its rooms contain a museum dedicated to the beloved artist, with family photos and memorabilia, as well as the bed where she spent so much time painting while recovering from a horrifying streetcar accident in which she was impaled on a metal pole. White with yellow and blue tile, the kitchen includes the names of herself and the love of her life and bane of her existence, Diego Rivera, spelled out on the walls. Her studio is decorated with artworks and supplies, as well as an easel and wheelchair.

But while Casa Azul remains a bucket list destination for any Kahlo enthusiast, a second museum dedicated to the artist, just a few blocks away, opened last September. Casa Roja pulls back the curtain on Kahlo’s family life and, perhaps, introduces a new work to her oeuvre—a kitchen mural, El mesón de los gorriones (“The Table of the Scroungers”). It features the branches of a grapefruit tree like the one growing in the house’s courtyard, bougainvillea and a banner inscribed with the title held aloft by sparrows. While the mural is unsigned, it is believed by the family to be the work of Kahlo, despite French newspaper Le Monde citing both German art historian Helga Prignitz-Poda and biographer Luis-Martín Lozano, specialists in Kahlo’s work, insisting she did not paint it. They also assert that the basement could hardly have been the artist’s private redoubt, as claimed, on account of her limited mobility due to polio and her debilitating accident.

“Polio never stopped her, not even the accident stopped her. She would climb on top of the fridge and say you didn’t clean here,” Adán García Fajardo, director of the new museum, tells Observer, while also conceding that there is no proof of authorship.

Kahlo’s grandniece, Mara Romeo Kahlo lived in Casa Roja up until 2023. “I don’t care if they say it was or it wasn’t,” she says of Le Monde’s reporting. “I was eight or nine years old, I always saw those paintings on the wall. It’s just a weird thing to do without backing it up with at least some scholarly research or something. My mother and my grandmother always talked about the mural, they say that it was from Frida.”

Romeo’s daughter, Frida Hentschel, recalls one of Kahlo’s students visiting the house and confirming that he and his classmate did not paint it, saying he remembers the mural from visits dating as far back as the late 1940s. While Christina, Frida’s younger sister, also liked to paint, neither Romeo nor Hentschel believe it’s her work.

“There is no doubt it was in the imagery of the Kahlo family,” Fajardo insists, noting that Kahlo featured grapefruit in her 1928 still life, Portrait of Cristina, My Sister. “There’s a signature that was blurred out, and you have bougainvillea and the sparrows are representative of an open house where everyone can come. It might be Frida, I don’t say it’s hers. We think it was painted around 1938. Legally, the mural can’t be traced to Frida.”

Casa Roja is filled with ephemera, letters, postcards, a dark room and photos taken by the artist’s father, Guillermo Kahlo, a German immigrant who adopted the Spanish for his given name, Wilhelm. A successful photographer in turn-of-the-century Mexico City, he spent his free time painting still lifes and outdoor scenes, sometimes finding his missing supplies in the hands of his third daughter, Frida. When she was old enough, he employed her to tint his photos, teaching her lessons on composition and color.

Ironically, the streetcar accident likely played a big role in Kahlo becoming an artist. She was attending medical school at the time and had planned to become a doctor. But the accident left her bedridden with few options to dispel boredom but to paint. It also accounts for the proliferation of self-portraits throughout her career (over 50), since there were so few paint-worthy subjects at hand.

Kahlo married Diego Rivera in 1929, and he paid off the mortgage on Casa Azul in 1931 when Guillermo and Matilde (who died in 1932) moved to Casa Roja. There, Kahlo sought refuge from her tempestuous marriage from 1934-35 after discovering an affair between her beloved younger sister, Christina, and Rivera.

“We don’t have evidence of that,” counters Fajardo. “But what we know about the relationship between the two sisters, it never ceased. They never broke or separated. Frida always thought of Christina as the other half of her heart. Every letter she wrote to her was full of love. So, for someone who was betrayed by a sister, it doesn’t seem for this to be real.”

Following Kahlo’s death in 1954, Rivera was instrumental in authoring the mythos surrounding his wife, but it wasn’t until his death in 1957 that she became a feminist icon. “She started growing in the mind and heart of the people who saw her art,” says Fajardo, who sees the 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera as pivotal to the public’s perception of Kahlo, followed by the 2002 movie starring Salma Hayek. “The family wants to show that Frida was also a really lively persona. This space speaks about the intimate life of Frida when she was a child and afterwards, the circle of affection that was close to Frida though there were those who tried to monopolize the story.”

The gift shop at Casa Roja features all things Frida, ranging from replicas of her clothing to stationery inspired by her childhood photographs. Open to question is whether Kahlo—an anti-capitalist who joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927 and hosted (and slept with) Leon Trotsky at Casa Azul—would approve.

“You won’t see an exploitation of Frida imagery,” Fajardo says about the gift shop. “Transforming a Barbie to Frida, I wouldn’t do that. It’s without any respect for the family.” He’s alluding to an ongoing court battle pitting Frida Kahlo Corporation against Familia Kahlo, specifically Romeo, filed in 2018 after the former sold the rights of Kahlo’s image to Mattel who then produced a Frida Kahlo-inspired Barbie doll. After years of legal wrangling, in April the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the corporation’s lawsuit against Romeo, suing the family for tortious interference, potentially exposing them to millions in damages. Proceedings will likely take place later this year.

“This is the final fight, and we are positive that this is going to come our way. They’ll have to rule in our favor,” says Hentschel, with Romeo adding, “They can’t steal my history, my life, my everything. I believe that the world is going to say that we are in the right part, because it’s ours, no?”

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The only thing predictable about a Charles Ray show is that it will be unpredictable. His sculptures, ranging from a life-sized toy firetruck to a marble cube filled with Pepto-Bismol, are so varied that his trademark could be “expect the unexpected.” The Chicago-born sculptor currently has two shows in his hometown, Los Angeles, at Jeffrey Deitch through June 6 and at Matthew Marks through June 13.

The first features three older works, including Firetruck (1993), a life-sized toy truck made from aluminum and fiberglass. The second features four pieces, including one he worked on for over 10 years, Fallen Horse (2025), a granite sculpture of a life-sized horse lying on its side.

“There’s a lot of distance between the two shows and of course there are similarities, but then they’re really quite different, too,” Ray tells Observer, suggesting it’s best to walk the two miles between the galleries. “I don’t think that they’re schizophrenically different but for me it was interesting to see the temporal distance between Firetruck and Fallen Horse.”

Firetruck is part of the Broad collection but, at just over 47 feet long, it’s seldom exhibited. After being in storage for years, it took some restoration to get it looking shiny and bright again for the Deitch show. “I was always very resistant to showing it indoors, but then when it was brought in for the first time, I thought a lot about back in the day when I made it, and the people who helped me make it and the deadline and the sign painters who helped me with the decals.”

According to Ray, it’s both a toy becoming a real fire truck and a fire truck becoming a toy. “This was a big public sculpture embedded in the city in a really beautiful way because you might not notice it,” he says, referring to the time it sat at the curb in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 1993 Biennial and left some wondering where the fire was.

Finding tires to fit the piece bedeviled him until one day, driving around in the San Fernando Valley, he saw a sign for a tire shop featuring a massive tire. He asked the owner how much it would cost and was told it wasn’t for sale. He offered $200 and walked out the door with what turned out to be a tire from the landing gear of a large wide-body jet.

The Matthew Marks show includes a similarly derived work, Junk 2 (2026), a sculpture of machine and engine parts painted in the bright colors of plastic toys. On a typical foray scavenging for items to use in his work, Ray came across a stack of cogs and brackets set out for a scrap collector. He liked it so much he asked the welder to fix them together exactly as they stood, then had some assistants paint them in the colors of their choosing. The result is an array of candy-colored pieces that occupy the opposite end of the same spectrum as John Chamberlain’s automobile-derived abstract-expressionist sculptures of the 1970s.

Twenty years after Firetruck, Ray embarked on Fallen Horse, now on a plinth that occupies the main room at Marks. While the approach seems straightforward, Fallen Horse underwent numerous iterations. It began with photos and studies of a real prostrate horse, including one with a cowboy resting a reassuring hand on the animal’s neck, then one with Ray himself replacing the cowboy, sitting in front of the horse, first nude, then clothed. A clay model was then scanned into a computer and machined in foam fragments, which were assembled and coated with a layer of clay. At one point, Ray decided it should be made in granite, and so a 12-ton piece was struck from a quarry in Virginia, then broken in two, with one half becoming the horse and the other the plinth.

“I would use improper orientation for alignment, without making the grain match up. The grain of the granite would come together but in a quiet way. With soft cuts, the horse emerges,” he explains, noting it was machine-carved to a point before Ray sculpted the finer details by hand. “I’m thinking about details like the tail, how do you extract the tailness or the maneness of the horse? Hair is really difficult. How do you just make it so you flow through it? The only way I could figure it out was to make it cartoon but realistic. As it starts to emerge, you see a materiality you haven’t thought about before.”

When the machine changes its bit, it doesn’t realign to exactly where it left off, resulting in offsets—a sort of machine fingerprint which can be removed with additional passes, but doing so might sacrifice detail. Ray opted to keep some offsets in place, serving as a signature on a finished product that combines machine logic with human intervention.

Sitting adjacent to Firetruck, Pepto-Bismol in a Marble Box (1988), the earliest work in either show, presents what Ray calls a simple inversion—nausea produced by confronting the cure. Made from marble filled with the famously pink antacid, which sits on its surface like a solid, the cube echoes the work of Larry Bell, and the liquid calls to mind Noguchi’s Water Stone, but more so Ray’s own work from the 1980s, Ink Box, a transparent cube filled with ink, and Ink Line, a stream of ink that appears to be a solid connection between ceiling and floor.

A few steps away is Table (1990), a seemingly glass table on a steel frame holding delicately carved pitchers, decanters, cups and bowls that, it turns out, are made of plexiglass. “The key to that work is space, all sculpture is about space,” he tells Observer about a piece he considers among his most complete works. The containers are actually fixed to the table, open on top and bottom. “It allows space to flow through and around it. It’s inseparable from its environment.”

Also at Marks, The Animation of Pandora (2026), whose clean white surfaces appear to be marble but are bronze painted white. This classical-looking trio of nude figures, a man and a woman with a girl between them, is based on the myth in which Zeus decided to punish mankind after Prometheus gave them fire by commanding Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, meant to torment the human race. In Ray’s sculpture, Hephaestus holds his hand over the girl who appears to be in a trancelike state as Athena waits nearby to clothe her in a silvery gown. Here, the gown is missing, and the blank look of Pandora echoes the lifeless mask of an automaton, referencing classics like filmmaker Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis as well as composer Léo Delibes’ ballet Coppélia.

While it’s easy to think of the two shows as bookends on Ray’s career, they’re not. The earliest piece in the Deitch show was made a full 15 years after his most notable early work, Plank Piece I-II (1973), in which he pinned his body to the wall with a wooden plank. “These exhibitions might appear as two subsets, divided by time,” he explains. “I hope instead they form a single mereology—a continuous body of work descending across decades, perhaps even reaching back much further, to something like the animation of Pandora.”

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Talk of a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art goes back at least 25 years, when Rem Koolhaas OMA presented a plan that proposed a full razing of William Pereira’s 1965 campus and replacing it with a single tent-like structure. That never happened, but Pritzker Award-winning architect Peter Zumthor’s idea for an inkspot, or black rose as it was also called, did. Controversy swirled from the start, with critics lambasting the price tag, estimated at $724 million, including $125 million of public money, for a plan the LA Times compared to a small city airport. Never mind that at 110,000 square feet, it was approximately 10,000 feet smaller than the original building, leading the same paper to dub it “the incredible shrinking museum.”

Love it or not, the new David Geffen Galleries, an elevated single-story structure that sprawls like an amoeba across Wilshire Boulevard, is a generally well-received addition to the city’s landscape and a must-see for art lovers. Sepulchral spaces varying in size give way to panoramic views of the city through textile designer Reiko Sudo’s metallic curtains, which protect the artwork from harmful rays but often admit reflective glare. Home to the permanent collection, roughly 155,000 objects spanning 6,000 years, of which about 2 to 3 percent is on display, the floor plan and organizational layout represent a stark departure from what most museumgoers are accustomed to.

The mini-catalog accompanying the new wing is called “Wander,” and that’s precisely what visitors are meant to do. You might move from a gallery housing Japanese netsuke carvings into one containing textiles from the Andes, or from an aerial photo of an ocean by Andreas Gursky to ancient Indian art from Mathura. It’s a radical notion some might find refreshing and others jarring.

“Diversity is one element of how you make the historical collection relative to the living culture,” LACMA CEO Michael Govan tells Observer. “We’re comfortable with the productive chaos of diversity, and we acknowledge the power of no hierarchies, and we promote that it’s the strength of L.A., that it’s diverse.” There are 80 small presentations across the galleries, and “there’s no one path through the museum, no one story of our history. There are no hierarchies. That is key.”

Although the floor plan of the new building is meant to place different cultures on equal footing, foot traffic through any space tends to establish its own pattern. When I was there, most lingered around the central galleries or drifted west toward the view of Beverly Hills where Matisse’s mosaic, La Gerbe, is given a seat of prominence. Those who ventured east tended to stay on the western side of the structure, taking in the campus outside and Wilshire Boulevard below. Here hangs a newly acquired triptych, Three Studies of Lucien Freud by Francis Bacon, which has already emerged as the star of the new wing.

“The idea is to create meaningful context through this idea of migration and interconnectedness, the inverse of the nineteenth century model of categories and separation and organization of time and space by a Cartesian grid. Peter (Zumthor) tried to design a museum that was pretty evenhanded,” Govan says, explaining the flow of the space in doublespeak. “I myself go in different directions. And I think if one direction gets too privileged, we’ll probably change the art, and give a better draw to balance it. Democracy is a weird thing; it’s all things equal. This is subjectively diverse.”

What’s not subjectively diverse is the public art fronting the museum. Chris Burden’s Urban Light retains its old place separating the courtyard from the street, while a new addition a block east and across Wilshire Boulevard is Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker. Tony Smith’s Smoke has barely moved from its old position, but is now outside by the staircase leading up to the new gallery. The new sculpture garden fronting the building features bronzes by Auguste Rodin, and in the fountain by the courtyard is one of the museum’s first commissions, Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls), which has been lovingly restored. Behind the Resnick Pavilion, Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass still stands where it was installed in 2012. The museum architects include Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Bruce Goff, whose Japanese Pavilion is highlighted as never before. The buildings that comprise the campus are named for Resnick, Geffen and Broad. Every artist, donor and architect named here is a white man, including Michael Govan.

To be fair, Yoshitomo Nara’s Miss Forest has occupied a space adjacent to Urban Light since 2020, and since 2012 Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads has greeted visitors by the elevator to the parking garage. New additions to the campus include Mariana Castillo Deball’s Feathered Changes in the courtyard under the new wing, as well as Pedro Reyes’ monolithic face, Tlali, across from the elevators on the ground level.

LACMA in the 21st century has long differentiated itself from East Coast and European museums by deemphasizing the Western canon and casting its gaze to the Americas, the Far East and Oceanic peoples. But Western art routinely draws top prices at auction, which often influences which artworks major museums choose to acquire for their permanent collection. In this way, the public is educated on which art is most vital and subsequently seeks it out. Generally, Impressionism and Renaissance art remain a big draw, especially for the majority of museumgoers who happen to be over 60. Gen X prefers 20th-century art, including works by practitioners like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein, while Millennials have a hankering for street art.

Unfortunately, LACMA’s egalitarian gesture is, in practice, aspirational only. To achieve such goals would require a shift in institutional collecting as well as art market prices that favor Western artists, both of which are beyond LACMA’s control. While change is occurring in the art world, it is at an incremental rate that will take decades to effect. The concepts embodied by the new Geffen wing, practicable or not, are part of that shift and ought to be considered a bold move in the right direction.

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John and Dominique de Menil, for whom the venerable Houston-based Menil Collection is named, had a longstanding relationship with Cy Twombly dating back to the 1960s when they began collecting the idiosyncratic artist’s work. Today, the museum houses the largest Twombly collection in North America, including a freestanding gallery designed by Renzo Piano and dedicated to the artist. Last year, the collection grew substantially when the Cy Twombly Foundation donated 121 works, none of which had been previously shown in the U.S., 27 of which compose “The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly,” on through August 9.

The works span roughly four decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, and include some from 2005, six years before the artist’s death. Among them is a collage titled Narcissus (1975), which, at first glance, appears to be just the name written in crayon on a smudgy white surface. But a closer look reveals two pieces of paper, constituting a collage in the technical sense, with the name inscribed twice, one above the other, as if a reflection, thereby gesturing to the titular mythological hunter entranced by his own countenance.

Narcissus resembles a drawing more than a collage, in some ways fitting with the bulk of the gift, which is mainly drawings and paintings on paper. “On the drawing side, we had a number of works, but there was a big gaping hole, and now we can tell the whole story of Twombly across media and throughout the years,” Edouard Kopp, chief curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, told Observer.

Included are abstract landscapes painted in acrylic and oil on homemade paper. Hinting at the works of Claude Monet, their texture also references Twombly’s gray paintings from the 1980s (also included), which showed at the Venice Biennale. “The paint is thickly applied, interesting and gestural brushwork, impasto not in all places, not evenly, but because of that, the paper is really wavy,” is how Kopp describes the landscapes. “The texture is very subtle and the colors very warm and soothing, and intense in vigor and energy… they’re a little disconcerting.”

” Disconcerting” is a polite way of describing how viewers often interpret Twombly’s work; “scribble-scrabble” is another. Minimalist artist and critic Donald Judd called Twombly’s 1964 show at Castelli Gallery a fiasco, writing in Arts Magazine: “In these paintings, there are a couple of swirls of red paint mixed with a little yellow and white and placed high on a medium-gray surface. There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line. There isn’t anything to the paintings.”

“I think it grabbed his attention,” Kopp said of Judd’s scathing review. “People who don’t know his art well might reproach him at first, and the other reproach might be how elusive he is. He’s interested in the act of de-skilling—moving away from academic skill and seeing what happens on the sheet of paper or canvas if you try to unlearn what you’ve learned.”

To do so, he explored the element of chance in his work, sometimes drawing in total darkness, relying on instincts and primordial forces to guide his hand. “You let your mind and hand go, and it can be completely unconscious,” said Kopp, noting that some such works in the collection date to 1954, when Twombly worked as a cryptologist for the U.S. Army. “When you make a blind drawing, it’s the very opposite of making an academic drawing where you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Here, you don’t know what you’ll achieve. The act of drawing becomes an act of discovery. So, you let chance have its influence. Then you decrypt to see what you’ve done.”

Born in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly was named for legendary pitcher Cy Young by his father, who was a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at Lexington’s Washington and Lee University, he also studied at New York’s Art Students League, where he became romantically involved with Robert Rauschenberg, who suggested he study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he met artists like Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn and John Cage before relocating to Rome in 1957, where he spent most of his career.

At the age of 24, he wrote on a grant application, “What I’m trying to establish is that modern art isn’t dislocated, it’s something with roots, tradition and continuity. For myself, the past is the source. For all art is rightfully contemporary.”

Narcissus is just one example of his works named for mythological figures. Not included here are his 1962 pieces, Leda and the Swan and The Birth of Venus. Another example is his Fifty Days at Iliam, a 10-part cycle completed in the 1970s and inspired by Homer’s Iliad. “He’s a contemporary artist, but he’s also deeply connected with the past,” noted Kopp. “He was fascinated by going back to the origins of mankind, the origins of art. So for me, he’s always between the past and the present.”

Twombly’s references in some way predate the ancients, reaching as far back as cave paintings, primitive mark-making, untitled feral scratchings and asemic messaging that place the burden of meaning on the viewer. “With the art of drawing, he was interested in connecting back to earlier histories of man, primeval qualities and the gesture of drawing. He is not trying to communicate clearly. He’s trying to communicate a field of illusions, a state of interrogation. He’s of a generation that was interested in the idea of the open work, the idea of Umberto Eco,” Kopp said, referencing the Italian semiotician’s “open text” concept introduced in his 1962 collection of essays, Opera aperta, which proposes that literary works are active, dynamic fields of meaning.

“Twombly is interested in creating work where the viewer is a full participant. You have to bring your body, your gaze, some knowledge, and he’ll give you snippets, some trails and perhaps a title,” Kopp offered, adding after a pause, “though most of his work is untitled.”

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Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos did not win an Oscar for his latest sci-fi piece, Bugonia, but still photos from the set found their way into his new show at Onassis Stegi in Athens, “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs,” on through May 17. It features 110 new images, as well as three bodies of work linked to his films, making it the largest exhibition of the A-list director’s photographs ever presented in an institutional context. Designed in the form of a classical Greek temple, a central altar-like space displays the bulk of the show, mostly black-and-white images, with film-related pieces occupying the outer perimeter.

As a student at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos in Athens, Lanthimos was inspired by the work of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Joel-Peter Witkin. Taking pictures on his film sets for publicity purposes eventually became taking photos for their own sake, which he developed in a makeshift darkroom in his hotel room, often with the help of Emma Stone, while on location. “I started with a technical interest in photography in order for me, I thought, to grow into filmmaking. But through the whole process of filmmaking, where I had to use photography, taking pictures, this also gave me a way to move away from the film during preparation,” Lanthimos told a group of us gathered for the opening.

Culled from images shot over the past five years, the show includes three photographic series made on film locations in New Orleans, Atlanta and Henley-on-Thames, as well as soundstages in Budapest. Some are from previously exhibited portfolios, like “Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken,” assembled during the filming of Poor Things, including portraits of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef in costume. i shall sing these songs beautifully parallels the production of Kinds of Kindness, and viscin includes previously unseen works captured on the set of Bugonia.

A portrait of his dog, Vyronas, adopted upon the filmmaker’s 2021 return to Athens, gets star treatment as the poster image of the new show, which includes black-and-white prints shot in the city and on Greek islands. Focus is on the mundane—an image of a pale figure looking down on a nighttime lawn, and a security guard, back to the camera, facing a cinderblock wall. A woman stands in the stark shadow of a streetlamp post at a traffic intersection in one image, while another shows a coffin propped up in an undertaker’s office. A third is of a remote fishing village on the island of Ikaria, where Lanthimos’ grandmother grew up.

“What the work shows is how you could stand there, and you can extrapolate a narrative beyond the frame,” offered curator Michael Mack, noting that the accompanying book is a leporello fold that mimics a filmic sequence. “It’s almost more interesting what’s happening beyond the frames and what it engenders in the viewer. And that’s the power of the medium. This exhibition establishes his flourishing capacity to elicit emotional and intellectual leaps of faith beyond the frame of a still photograph.”

While he holds six Oscar nominations, a Golden Globe nod and a BAFTA for his film The Favourite, Lanthimos’s embrace of photography stems from what the medium offers that his chosen profession doesn’t—creating not with a team but individually and with no specific goal, time or money constraints. “You don’t need a producer, and you don’t need to be checking the budget. So, this gives you some freedom, a great freedom,” he said. “A picture may be used in a book, it might be presented in an exhibition or make different combinations with another narrative. Each time they acquire a different meaning. Or the tone is different, or the theme changes. If you include more of one type of picture with another type, suddenly a different theme becomes more prevalent.”

This viewpoint demonstrates a foundational cinematic concept known as the Kuleshov Effect. In 1918, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov showed that context determines how audiences interpret a shot. Placing a neutral-faced person next to a bowl of soup led viewers to think the subject was hungry, while placing the same shot next to an image of a dead child led viewers to think the subject was in mourning. Lanthimos, by altering the order and context in which his photos are viewed, exercises this cinematic rule to achieve a variety of effects.

“Everything is interesting. Everything can be complicated, even a landscape, even an animal face,” says Lanthimos, who in keeping with his sui generis body of work, is currently developing a film adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s Gothic western novel, The Hawkline Monster. “I’m interested in so many different things and objects. I couldn’t really choose.”

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On the corner of Melrose Avenue and Kings Road in West Hollywood sits an unassuming building designed by Frank Gehry in the 1970s. It incorporates deconstructivist “L.A. School” elements such as exposed wood stud framing, skylights and airy spaces ideal for artmaking, an activity that has long occupied Gemini G.E.L., one of North America’s preeminent printmaking studios since 1966. Its client list is a who’s who of American artists from the mid-century onward, and this year marks its 60th anniversary.

“That’s many generations of artists,” curator Susan Dackerman tells Observer about the L.A.-themed show, “Impressions of Los Angeles: 60 Years of Printmaking at Gemini G.E.L.,” on through May 1. “This show could be done over and over with different imagery. Looking through the prints I realized that there was a great group of images in which artists tried to recreate the atmospheric conditions of L.A., the sunlight, mist, haze, L.A. exuberance, L.A. magic hours, from the hard light of Ken Price to the diffuse magic hour that Tacita Dean captures.”

In addition to the abovementioned, there are works by people like David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Ann Hamilton, John Baldessari, Richard Tuttle, Analia Saban, Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg, William Crutchfield, Joe Goode, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Diebenkorn, Toba Khedoori and Vija Celmins.

“One of the things Gemini has done so well is match artists with a technique that will allow them to execute their ideas no matter how difficult,” says Dackerman, a lecturer in art history at UCLA specializing in western print culture. “Some artists are working closer with a master printer, and there are printers here who can solve their problems. When the artist says I want 75 gradations of color, the printer figures that out. The artist has the vision, the printer has the technical skill.”

Lithography hasn’t changed much since 1796 when German playwright Alois Senefelder stumbled upon the idea of duplicating his scripts by writing them in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone and then printing them with rolled-on ink. While limestone is still sometimes used, the modern equivalent is the more manageable aluminum plate, with each color and shade requiring a separate one. The initial step is mark making, putting the composition on aluminum, followed by the printing, fixing the image to a surface. Each time a plate gets printed it has to be re-inked.

For example, Lichtenstein’s multi-hued Sunshine Through the Clouds (1985) required 27 colors in 23 runs from five aluminum plates, three Finnish birch woodblocks and 15 screens. “When people look at paintings, which are also complicated to make, I don’t think they get as involved in the technical aspects. What kind of paint? Is it canvas? Is it linen?” Dackerman says, distinguishing between the two mediums and how they are perceived. “I think prints lend themselves to complicated analysis. And sometimes what gets lost is what happens when all that technical skill ends up on a sheet of paper and you have a great image.”

Tacita Dean’s LA Exuberance 2 (2016), a deceptively simple skyscape of striated clouds on blue, required plates for every shade of blue and white. “It looks like a photo but it’s not,” says Dackerman. “She drew it and used chalk and sprayed chalk and drew and smudged and I think it does a really good job of replicating L.A. skies. Then, after doing the blue sky she realized the sky makes other colors in the hour right before sunset,” which describes Dean’s second piece in the show, LA Magic Hour 13 (2021).

A longtime L.A. resident now living in London, David Hockney created prints involving a wide array of media and techniques ranging from the use of mylar to iPad drawings. His weather series from 1973 include Sun (1973), an 8-color lithograph/silkscreen, Mist, a 5-color lithograph, and Rain, a 6-color lithograph/silkscreen.

“I think this is one of the best print series that he did,” Dackerman says, nodding approvingly toward Rain. “Once you put the color down, you can make scratches in it, and that allowed him to get the raindrops with a little bit of bounce at the bottom. He allowed the ink to drip and the ridges are like water pools. You get a much cleaner line.”

Richard Diebenkorn’s Twelve (1985) is done in his familiar style of color blocks in beige, brown and green, bordered in blue, like empty lots from a bird’s eye view. A 14-color lithograph, it seems to employ the blotchy texture of watercolor. “He allows the characteristics of printmaking to set the scene like he uses paints to set the scene on those canvases, watery diluted markmaking that’s very typical of lithography,” notes Dackerman. “In this print, it’s what he emphasizes. He’s letting it happen when he’s putting the ink down on the surface of the stone. And the way it moves, he leaves it there.”

Known primarily for his pop-art sculptures, Claes Oldenburg has four pieces in the show, including Sneaker Lace in Landscape – Red (1991), which is based on one of his sculptures. The ankle high sneaker blends with the white background leaving visible only the lace, which resembles a scribbly red palm tree, the bow resembling fronds. He arrived in the city in 1968 and spent two months writing and drawing before making the series, 12 images based on his notes and presented in his signature playful style.

Analia Saban’s Wooden Floor on Wood (Horizontal) (2017) is a seemingly simple technical exercise depicting the textured floor of her West Adams bungalow, a singular illustration of the challenges presented by the medium. Made from a photo she transferred to an etching plate, it was reworked by the artist to emphasize lines and incisions. “There’s an emulsion on the plate,” explains Dackerman, “partly photo emulsion, light onto the plate. But then the plate needs to be incised so that ink can sit in those incisions and the plate can be pressed, creating an impression in the wood.”

Of the eight prints by Robert Rauschenberg, two are snowflakes made in 1982, collaging photo elements and commenting on “flaky” Angelenos. Others, like Chronosaur (1993) feature familiar landmarks like the dinosaur with a clock in its mouth topping Hollywood Boulevard’s Ripley Believe it or Not! Museum. His L.A. Uncovered series from 1998 is a collage of familiar sights derived from photographs of storefronts, Watts Tower and the Marlboro man that used to tower over Sunset Strip, reading, “It’s the earthquakes, fires and riots that are real.”

“Turns out that’s true,” quips Dackerman. “They all got assembled and printed. He gave a real flavor of what L.A. is.” Images of Sid Vicious, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Bob Marley comprise Marmont Flair (1991), with a red curtain symbolizing the legendary West Hollywood hotel.

Beginning with Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz’s Ferus Gallery in 1957, L.A. has evolved into a contemporary art mecca, becoming the first to exhibit Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans and to celebrate Marcel Duchamp with his first career retrospective in 1963. Movements like Finish Fetish and Light and Space emerged in the 1960s, led by artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, and pioneering pop artists like Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston called the city home for decades.

With the opening of MOCA in 1986, the addition of The Getty in 1997, The Broad in 2015 and the expansion of LACMA (which opens next month), the city has become home to titans old and new, with Gemini G.E.L. drawing practitioners from every corner of the country. “L.A. can be depicted in so many different ways, and you can capture so many different aspects of it,” Dackerman assures us. “It figures as a subject in artwork in a very real way that we don’t often think of a city as a subject. But L.A. is that.”

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“Art is the highest thing we do in society. It touches us in ways, conscious and unconscious,” collector Jordan D. Schnitzer, a real estate magnate whose family has been at the forefront of Portland’s shakers and movers for decades, tells Observer. His collection, among the largest in North America, includes 2,000 paintings and sculptures by modern and contemporary mavens like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella, Judy Chicago, Jeffrey Gibson, Alison Saar and Kara Walker, and thousands more prints, including 1,400 by Warhol. “Waking up without art around me is like waking up without the sun.”

His collection also includes hundreds of works by David Hockney, many of which have been touring the country, moving from the Honolulu Museum of Art to the Palm Springs Art Museum, then the Grand Rapids Art Museum, before finally making its way back to the Portland Art Museum in Schnitzer’s hometown, on view through July. Collectively, the show is a kaleidoscope of Hockney’s oeuvre, with California swimming pools, Yosemite National Park and rural French landscapes, as well as portraits of friends and family, book illustrations and theatrical backdrops. Included are early lithographs Hockney made with Ken Tyler, who started L.A.’s legendary print house Gemini GEL in the 1960s.

While still a student at the Bradford School of Art in London, Hockney relied mainly on fundamental printmaking techniques such as lithography and etching, which he embraced throughout his lifetime. The earliest piece being shown in Portland is a self-portrait (one of at least four)—a lithograph dated 1954 from his student days. He is pictured here with a dark bowl cut (he dyed his hair blond when he heard that blonds have more fun), a tie, a vest and striped trousers, set against yellow-striped wallpaper.

Eventually, he moved on to aquatinting, which uses a copper plate etched with nitric acid to achieve a watercolor-like effect. Later techniques include soft-ground, an intaglio process using greasy, soft and tacky ground on a copper or zinc plate to achieve softer lines and tonal areas. Examples at Portland Art Museum include an homage to Picasso, The Student, which shows the artist’s head on a column alongside a student with a sketchpad tucked under his arm. Hockney’s sugar-lift prints involved etching an image with water-soluble sugar/ink, covering a plate in hard ground, dissolving the sugar in hot water and applying aquatint and acid. Using this technique, Hockney again honors Picasso with his Blue Guitar Series, also in the show.

By the 1980s, he had embarked on his Home Made Prints series using a Xerox machine to make colorful still lifes like Apples, Pears & Grapes and Bowl of Fruit or the monochrome Black Plant on Table from 1986. His Office Chair uses six sheets of Arches paper (the finest), run through a Xerox machine to assemble the multi-colored composition. “While he was living in L.A., I was in his studio at least once a month,” says Kimberly Davis of LA Louvre Gallery, which has represented the artist since the 1970s. “All the ideas behind every picture are just as important as how he developed things and why. He was always working with people and/or places. And he was never reticent to use new technology. His father was an inventor, a photographer, and his long love of photography shows up in many aspects of the work.”

Portraits are a fixture in Hockney’s output, including a collection of 82 made for his 2016 show “82 Portraits and 1 Still Life” at the Royal Academy of the Arts. One of the sitters is Douglas Roberts, who attended the opening in Portland. “I met David shortly after I graduated from UCLA, about 1982,” he recalls. “He was on the kitchen floor on his hands and knees, shuffling Polaroid pictures around that he had just taken of people. He was photographing Polaroids and watching them develop and creating mosaics of a person. And we proceeded to talk for two hours about Pablo Picasso.”

Part of his Moving Focus Series, Hotel Acatlan: Two Weeks Later, is a piece from 1985 made when Hockney and some friends were traveling through Mexico. It’s a portrait of a rural roadside inn that plays with reverse perspective, a recurring motif frequently found in his work from this point on. “This is a clear example of standing in one place and your eye sees all around the courtyard,” says Roberts of the print made from mylar. “It’s forced perspective, with you being in the middle of the picture and everything else is outside you. David could roll up the mylar and take it with him to Mexico. He didn’t have to take litho stones with him; he could layer the mylar and see through to the other colors. Then the mylar was used to make the plate from which the print was made.”

Reverse perspective is key to his 2014-2017 series of large-scale works composed of various photographic elements that jog expectations, sometimes resulting in background elements outsizing those in the foreground, as in images like The Chairs (2014), and more explicitly in Perspective Should Be Reversed from the same year. The artworks grow in size as the years progress, culminating in 2019’s In the Studio, another large-scale photographic drawing of the artist standing amid numerous reverse-perspective pieces that measures 32 ¾” x 89 ¾”.

Before viewers arrive at this grand summation, there are the iPad works—large-scale landscapes of Yosemite and Normandy made in the past ten years, first on his phone and later on his iPad. “The app he uses to be able to draw started with the iPhone. And then along comes the iPad, and it was a larger surface,” says Roberts, pointing to the narrow compositions created on the phone, like Lilies and Early Morning, both from 2009. “He met this kid who created an app called Brushes, so he could paint on the iPad with his finger. This kid developed a whole variety of tools for David.”

The large-scale iPad paintings are limited only by printer size. Finding the largest printer he could, Hockney defied those limits by printing a portion of the composition on individual sheets, which, when placed in order, created a mosaic of the larger image. For 7th August 2021, Rain on the Pond, another rural landscape made on the iPad, Hockney used watercolor on raw canvas to paint the pond, a technique he discovered while visiting Japan in the 1960s that has endured throughout his career.

So many prints, paintings, photos and collages in so many styles can be summed up in one word: greed. “I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money; I think that can be a burden,” Hockney has said. “I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle, and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.”

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Art week in L.A. isn’t just about Frieze but also the gallery shows and parties, as well as the ever-increasing number of satellite fairs offering artwork at a price that won’t break your bank account. This year, these included Post-Fair, Other Art Fair, Felix Art Fair and, making its inaugural appearance, BUTTER L.A.—part of the longstanding Indianapolis-based BUTTER Fine Art Fair, which showcased the work of African-American artists at Hollywood Park in Inglewood.

“We have emergent all the way through blue-chip artists, something for everyone: museums and institutional collectors, also corporate collectors,” curator-organizer Nakeyta Moore told Observer. “We have limited-edition works as well, and are covering all the bases when it comes to the type of art collector we’re inviting. Even though this is a Black artist-led fair, the collector base is very wide. It’s for anyone and everyone.”

Selected after roughly 30 studio visits, participating artists included former L.A. Dodger Micah Johnson, Autumn Breon, Cortney Herron, Micaiah Carter and April Bey, representing a blend of 50 percent Californian artists, mostly from L.A., 25 percent from Indianapolis and the rest from places like New York, Chicago and Miami. Just over half of the artworks on display sold, and the fair reported total sales of $177,750.

Preview night featured live painting by Mr. Wash (formally: Fulton Leroy Washington), who daubed away on a piece he’s been working on since the late 1980s that includes people like Trump and Elon Musk. “It talks about immigration and a lot of what we’ve all been experiencing for the past couple of years,” Moore said, adding that most of the work is apolitical despite the frenzy of our current era. “We’re kind of living in the storm right now, and from an artistic standpoint, you need to process what’s going on before the works start to roll out. I do think in the next few years we’ll see a bit more work that’s politicized, but people are a little bit scared.”

Meanwhile, the Other Art Fair visits Brooklyn, Dallas, London and Chicago, in addition to L.A., where it achieved record-breaking results last September. For the recent iteration, numbers weren’t as high but did result in the second-highest of all time for an L.A. edition of the fair, up 41 percent year over year from February 2025. The average transaction saw a jump of 16 percent year over year, as well as a jump in volume, up 21 percent.

Visitors to its new space, 3Labs in Culver City, enjoyed “The Art of Ping Pong: Play it Forward” cohosted by Altadena Brick by Brick, a local nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding homes destroyed by the Eaton Fire. For a small donation, visitors could play on custom-designed ping-pong tables that doubled as artworks. Among other highlights, The Goodbye Line was an interactive phone booth where people left anonymous voicemails saying goodbye to those they never got the chance to. And the Faux-To Booth offered analog hand-drawn likenesses in lieu of automated snapshots. Also featured was Thank You, an inflatable installation by French-Australian artist Linus Gruszewski constructed from 1,500 repurposed polyethylene take-out bags. The immersive geometric structure filtered sunlight, creating a shimmering environment that transformed everyday waste into fields of color.

“We appreciate that we’re not presenting an encyclopedic, didactic fair for people. We don’t aspire to be heavy-handed,” fair director Nicole Garton said of the show, which features displays mounted by individual artists, not galleries. “We’re called the Other Art Fair, and that means we’re not trying to be an alternative to the traditional arts space, but to expand it and bring other people in.”

As it has since 2019, Felix Art Fair took up residence in its usual haunt, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, adding 22 new exhibitors, including New York Life Gallery, L.A.’s Feia and SOM GALLERY from Tokyo while welcoming back 20 galleries, including Brigitte Mulholland from Paris, Corbett vs. Dempsey from Chicago and New York’s Uffner & Liu.

Set in rooms and cabanas around the historic hotel pool painted by David Hockney, this year’s edition of the boutique fair featured a room by textile artist Channing Hansen, whose immersive fabric maze confused and delighted visitors. Also not to be missed was Tierra del Sol’s all-female show of artists with disabilities. Six were selected from 150, among them Jenna Greene, who incorporates ASL in her work. She sold nearly all her pieces on the first day, contributing to the gallery’s early sales, which eclipsed their 2025 showing, according to curator Jenny Rask.

“Felix has turned into a discovery fair,” co-founder Mills Morán told Observer, noting their newly instituted application process has attracted “younger and newer galleries, galleries that are more recently opened… Slip House is just a year old,” he added, name-checking the Greenwich Village-based gallery. Slip House gallerist Ingrid Lundren reported selling half their inventory on day one, at prices ranging from $1,400 for works by Emily Clair Murdock to $54,000 for a large-scale work by Keisuke Tada.

On opening day, Feia Studio sold out its booth of works by Charles Hickey, Stroll Garden sold out its presentation of ceramic paintings by Raina Lee and ATLA sold out its booth of works by Yuka Mori. Carlye Packer sold more than 12 works, including design pieces by Ōmbia Studio and Simone Leigh’s Untitled (Cowrie), along with smaller works by emerging artists placed with both regular and new collectors. Entrance sold a work by Oliver Clegg for $45,000 and two works by Brianna Lance for $6,000 each. Oolong Gallery sold a work by My Barbarian for $20,000 along with works by Noah Schneiderman, Markus Bacher, Victoria Fu, Katy Crowe, Christina Hendershaw and Henrik Munk Soerense. Yancey Richardson sold three works by Zanele Muholi ranging from $15,000 to $29,000; two works by Tania Franco Klein for $9,500 and $11,500; a work by Marilyn Minter for $26,000; one by Omar Barquet for $5,500; one by John Divola for $19,000; and one by Mickalene Thomas for $10,000.

Morán doesn’t track sales for the show, only for his own gallery, Morán Morán, which he runs with his brother Al. “Right now is a mixed sales environment, and I see that continuing,” he said. “We’ve been stronger in the lower price points and mid-price points. The shows we’ve done have been really affordable, and they sell out.”

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Frieze Los Angeles, now in its seventh edition at Santa Monica Airport, serves as a temperature check on the L.A. art scene in a still-volatile market and among ongoing national discussions about affordability. Broad uncertainty has notably reshaped buyer behavior over the past year: following a 12 percent decline in 2024, the global art market continued to contract in 2025 amid recalibration, geopolitical instability and renewed tariff talk. Sales figures in the top tier (over $10 million) showed a sharp drop, while lower price points saw an increase. But on preview day earlier this week, the dealers were beaming.

Gemini G.E.L. sold prints by Ed Ruscha, David Hockney and Frank Gehry, among others. “We’ve done really well,” said the gallery’s Joni Weyl, turning to a large-scale piece by Julie Mehretu that was still waiting for a home. “It’s a big wall, and we’ve had a lot of nibbles on it at $450,000.” Almine Rech reported similarly brisk sales, placing a painting by Ewa Juszkiewicz in the $800,000 to $850,000 range and a sculpture by Aaron Curry in the $210,000 to $245,000 range, among other works sold. And David Zwirner reportedly sold a mixed-media work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby for $2.8 million and a painting Lynette Yiadom-Boakye for $1.5 million along with works by Lisa Yuskavage, Louis Fratino and Emma McIntyre.

“It’s a pleasure to be back at the fair and to introduce the work of Conny Maier to Los Angeles,” Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, told Observer. “The welcome on this first day has been incredibly warm. All the works in her solo presentation on our stand were placed.”

Jeffrey Deitch has ceramics by Sharif Farrag that have been moving briskly. “You give a platform to a younger artist, at a low price point, more people here can buy it,” he told Observer, grinning. For Gagosian, sales were brisk, including Ed Ruscha’s Heaven and Hot Sparks, Frank Gehry’s Fish on Fire and Alex Israel’s Paramount Pictures. And David Kordansky has been having what he calls “a super successful day,” selling out the program, which includes names like Ricky Swallow, Jonas Wood, Martha Diamond, Jared Buckhiester, Adam Pendleton, Mary Weatherford, Shara Hughes, Tom of Finland and Sam McKinniss. “The energy is really high, people are excited.”

Highlights include Gagosian’s exhibition of West Coast artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, Frank Gehry, Mark Grotjahn, Lauren Halsey, Alex Israel and Jonas Wood. Sprüth Magers’ booth is focused on another California legend, John Baldessari, and features works by Jenny Holzer, Gala Porras-Kim, David Salle and Kara Walker.

Pace Gallery presents a never-before-seen rounded diamond installation by light-and-space maestro James Turrell. Also on hand are works by Robert Longo, as well as historical works by Jean Dubuffet, David Hockney, David Lynch and Louise Nevelson. Early sales included 1983 Dubuffet painting for $475,000, Emily Kam Kngwarray’s Transition (1990) for $450,000, a sculpture and two works on paper by Longo and two works on paper by Hockney. David Kordansky Gallery covers the past and present with works by Sam Gilliam, Lauren Halsey and others. Likewise, Gladstone Gallery is offering a multi-generational presentation of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Frances Stark, among others, including Robert Rauschenberg, whose Saints Anonymous / ROCI VENEZUELA is part of his Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange initiative.

Roberts Projects is celebrating Betye Saar’s centennial with a presentation of altered Polaroids, sketchbooks and archival materials. Château Shatto is just one of the L.A.-based galleries that make up about half of the exhibitors in the show. They’re presenting 20th-century pieces by Emily Kam Kngwarray and John Divola opposite newer works by Emma McIntyre, Charlie Engelman and Julia Yerger. Over the weekend, they’ll present paintings by Paul Becker alongside Aria Dean’s sculptures from the set of her drama The Color Scheme. Solo shows include Larry Sultan’s The Valley, which examines suburbia and the porn industry in Los Angeles, on view at Casemore Gallery and at Yancey Richardson’s shared booth.

Curated by Essence Harden (EXPO CHICAGO, Made in L.A. 2025), “Focus: A Platform for Emerging Voices” spotlights 15 new galleries showing artists like Zenobia Lee, whose work reflects Caribbean culture, Ren Light Pan, whose ink paintings sit at the crossroads of traditional Chinese technique and trans-feminism and Turiya Adkins’ ‘Afro-futuremyth’ reimagining ancestral narratives.

The “Body & Soul” section focuses on L.A. artists engaging with the boundaries of the human form through a series of site-specific works presented throughout the fair’s public areas.

Cosmas & Damian Brown have Fountain: Sources of Light, a ring of 6 ceramic heads around a fountain. Incense smoke rises above flowing water in a basin filled with metal vessels. Shana Hoehn presents Deadfall, a large-scale sculpture made from a tree with sculpted cheerleader legs emerging from its branches. And Kohshin Finley’s …and someone was playing the piano, right? features large-scale stoneware vessels set in shadowbox shelving.

Dan John Anderson’s Threshold is marked by warm-toned stained glass filtering through blackened wood, and his Terra Seer, a large-scale sculpture with a figure either emerging or retreating, carries totemic weight in its cast bronze eyes. BOD, by Polly Borland, is a flesh-like 7-foot-tall figure in cast aluminum and finished in matte automotive paint, a continuation of the artist’s proclivity for wrapping models in stuffed pantyhose. Off campus, you’ll find Kelly Wall’s Everything Must Go in Westwood, a newsstand of illuminated glass newspapers and magazines.

For Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE), Amanda Ross-Ho rolls a 16-foot inflatable Earth counterclockwise around the perimeter of the Airport Park Soccer Field for the duration of the fair. “I’m pushing the ball around for four days,” says Ross-Ho, a self-described secret showgirl from her childhood days as a competitive figure skater. “The idea of doing time keeping of the four days, it’s a temporal container, but also thinking of artistic labor and mythology, Atlas, Sisyphus. But also thinking of something that exists continuously to make people aware of time passing. So, it’s like a median clock.”

On the first day, she circled the soccer field tirelessly, but there were still three more days to go. “It’s very nerve-wracking. How can I make something huge? So, it’s a gesture. The bigness is the gesture, not the object.”

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Los Angeles is diverse, LA Art Show director Kassandra Voyagis tells Observer. “You have to have multiple different voices, different things, you have to have young galleries, young artists. You have to push the envelope with exhibits of things that haven’t been seen before,” she explains. “The beauty of the LA Art Show is that galleries can take risks; that’s what makes L.A. stand apart.”

Starting today, more than 90 galleries, museums and arts organizations from around the world have converged on L.A.’s Convention Center for the 31st edition of the LA Art Show, which this year has no shortage of diverse voices. Featured exhibitions include “Elegant Freedom: Nature, Tradition, and the Human Spirit,” works by artist Jinny Suh that explore hanji, traditional Korean handmade paper from which the artist conjures chickens, birds and butterflies, symbols that explore themes of freedom and human connection. With “Including You And Me,” artist Moon Min deploys metal, resin and mixed media to reflect on modern humanity in relation to technology. Bright, abstract paintings and vessels by Dr. Esther Mahlangu, cultural ambassador of the Ndebele nation, will be presented by Art of Contemporary Africa. And Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri offers a selection of photorealist portraits of women.

With the fair situated just a stone’s throw from Hollywood, visitors can expect to see celebrity buyers as well as practitioners. “There are a lot of people in the entertainment world who have become artists,” Voyagis says. “It’s an avenue, it’s a creative outlet from acting to painting or drawing, so I get approached by a lot of celebrity artists and their galleries.”

Sylvester Stallone, for instance, has been painting since 1966, back when the future actor was a lad of 20. “The gallery walked me through the history and told me he started painting when he was a kid, before he started acting. And this was an escape for him from his household and where he grew up,” Voyagis says, pointing out a diptych of his signature character, Rocky, entitled Male Pattern Badness, priced at $2 million.

“I started selling these in June, and I’ve sold 27 pieces in the last six months,” Provident Fine Art gallerist Shawn David says of Stallone’s artwork. Another piece, Hercules O’Clock, priced at $1.2 million, references a pivotal moment in the actor’s youth when in viewing a Steve Reeves Hercules film, he discovered a male role model that would influence him for the rest of his life.

“Art collectors in their forties and up, Sly fans and buyers from all over the world,” is how David describes collectors of the actor’s work. “We had somebody purchase a fairly large piece, sight unseen, as most of them have been, from French Polynesia. So, literally from all over the world.”

Not to be outdone, Paul Simonon, former bassist of The Clash, will also be showing at the fair with London-based John Martin Gallery. “The moment I was old enough to ride a motorcycle, I got a Triumph, and a friend of mine, he had a Triumph. And we used to ride around a lot together in London, and this was during the Clash period,” Simonon tells Observer, noting the inspiration behind the five works shown here, featuring leather jackets, gloves, motorcycles, cigarettes and helmets. All are drawn from his 2014 show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, “Wot No Bike.”

“I got to know Lucien Freud quite well,” he recalls while discussing influences. The two met over cocktails in a bar one night and wound up talking about movies centered on artists, including one called Odd Man Out, featuring an artist played by Robert Newton whose father, Algernon Newton, was often called the Canaletto of London. “Newton turns out to be Lucien’s friend. And he took me to his house, and on the table was a Rodin bronze.”

Artist, sculptor, musician, Simonon also happens to be on the cover of The Clash’s London Calling album, an iconic black and white image featuring him smashing his guitar on the stage at New York’s Palladium in 1979.

“I remember it very well.” He smiles, recalling the moment. “To be honest, I just lost my temper. And when I lose my temper, I tend to destroy my own things. I don’t take it out on people. It was a sporadic moment. It was Strummer and Mick Jones who said it’s got to be on the cover.”

DIVERSEartLA, the fair’s noncommercial platform curated by Marisa Caichiolo, returns with “The Biennials, Art Institutions and Museums in the Contemporary Art Ecosystem,” exploring how art evolves through biennials and museums, and how they serve as engines of creative innovation and cultural dialogue. Caichiolo, who will be co-curating Chile’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, also curates the fair’s new Latin American Pavilion, centered on themes of memory, migration and identity.

For the art market, 2025 was a year of uncertainty, though auction houses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips closed out the year with strong results. Sotheby’s finished with a $2.3 billion November week, including the $527.5 million sale of the Lauder Collection, featuring Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which sold for $236.4 million.

“The summer was difficult,” Voyagis laments. “I think the market is still cautious, but it’s much better. The collector base here is under 40, which is really quite young. I think there’s finally that market and excitement around the art world and collecting in L.A. The LA Art Show, this will be our 31st year. I think we survived through all of it because we represent L.A., and I appreciate that the Angelenos come out and support us every year. I want the show to be open to everybody.”

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After Beth Morrison earned her bachelor of music at Boston University and a master’s of music at Arizona State University, she moved to New York City with limelight ambitions. What she encountered were like-minded creatives grousing about the entertainment industry’s indifference, which she set out to remedy by earning an MFA in theater management/producing at Yale School of Drama. Returning to New York in 2005, she set up Beth Morrison Productions and resumed grumbling over industry indifference.

Since then, BMP has become the country’s premier hothouse for new opera, staging more than 50 productions, including Pulitzer Prize winners Angel’s Bone by Du Yun and Royce Vavrek and p r i s m by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins. A Grammy nominee, BMP has four titles nominated for 2026, including Adoration and Trade / Mary Motorhead. Starting tomorrow, the company celebrates its quarter-century anniversary with the 2026 Prototype Festival, which this year will mount six productions at venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “I’ve been working for this change,” Morrison tells Observer. “It’s why I got into what I do in the first place, to create this new kind of opera. And I think we’ve done that. We have 15+ seasons in our history showing that, and we’ve inspired others as well.”

Fans will find inspiration in the BMP: Songbook Concert and Celebration (Jan. 7-8), a performance pulling together their greatest hits, with 14 arias culled from the company’s storied history and sung by the original artists. (If you can’t make the show, pick up the album, a double-disc vinyl set featuring 60 arias. It goes well with the BMP Songbook Anthology, a 500-page coffee table book celebrating the company’s history.)

Precipice takes to the boards Jan. 8-11, the story of a young woman’s struggle set against the epic backdrop of the mountainous West. Leaping from a tall cliff, she awakens mute in the wilderness, where she must fight to recover her voice. Set to Rima Fand’s folk-inspired score, Precipice incorporates sounds from nature, singers, string quintet, piano and mandolin.

Hildegard makes its New York City premiere Jan. 9-11 and 14. This must-see opera by the incomparable composer Sarah Kirkland Snider is named for the 12th-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic, visionary, writer, composer, philosopher and medical practitioner. The world premiere in Los Angeles last November drew superlative reviews on both coasts. “I’m so proud of her,” Morrison said at the time. “It’s been totally a labor of love. She loves Hildegard so much, the historical figure, and she’s written such a beautiful piece.”

If you can’t make it to Brooklyn, try Times Square on Jan. 11 for The All Sing: Hwael-Rād (Whale-Road) and join the choir for this world premiere choral work bridging the gap between humanity and our ocean-dwelling friends. “It’s this goth-industrial music meets classical,” is how Morrison describes the world premiere piece by composer Jens Ibsen. “We’ll have music up on the website, and anyone can download it and learn it and come and sing with us.”

The New York premiere of the comedic post-rock opera What to Wear (Jan. 15-18) by Michael Gordon and the late avant-garde theater icon Richard Foreman draws from the latter’s original staging. A collaboration between BMP, BAM and Bang on a Can, this acerbic commentary on society’s superficiality features a cameo by St. Vincent. “Already we’re selling out and had to add a performance. It’s going to be the hardest ticket to find. It’s a huge lift because it’s raising a lot of money in a short period of time to get it done, and it’s a complicated production,” says Morrison. “It’s crazy and amazing, it reminds me of Einstein on the Beach. It’s a spectacular show, truly one to blow people’s minds.”

On Jan. 16-17, submerge yourself in Art Bath, a cross-disciplinary experience highlighting female voices and genre-bending music and opera, theater, puppetry and visual art. Also not to be missed is Tiergarten on Jan. 16, a Weimar cabaret in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Carroll Street. Directed by Andrew Ousley, it explores historical moments of societal madness, featuring music by Handel, Verdi, Dean Martin, Max Richter, William Byrd, Brecht, Weill and songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the form of opera, classical, jazz, ballet and burlesque.

Over the years, BMP has expanded to a staff of 14 and launched its Next Gen program fostering emerging opera composers. From it, one is offered a commission for an evening-length work as well as a world premiere production. BMP’s partnership with LA Opera has resulted in 17 shows in 10 years. The Prototype Festival has only been in existence for 15 years, relying mainly on the generosity of individual donors, including the Mellon Foundation, a major backer whose agreement with BMP runs out in 2028—something that has sent Morrison scrambling.

“If we don’t replace it, what does that mean? What will the festival look like? That’s our challenge now. I’m someone who’s a very pragmatic dreamer. I’ve got a couple of big ideas that I’m working on right now to bring a lot of partners together to create something larger than ourselves, exploring opportunities,” she says, lamenting, like so many arts institutions, the loss of NEA money after 560 grants totaling over $27 million were cut last May.

“A lot of foundations have left the arts that were really holding it together or have changed their priority in how they fund the arts. And a lot of individual donors who have propped up the non-profit performing arts for decades are aging out. A lot are dying, and there isn’t anybody coming up and taking their place,” she says. “It’s not easy, but it’s never been easy. It’s harder than it’s ever been. We’re announcing thirteen commissions over the next five years. It’s a big campaign for us. We’ve never done a campaign like this before, but it’s exciting. There’s a lot of amazing work being done here that people should feel good about. We’re just trying to create a conversation about what opera can be in the 21st Century.”

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In his lifetime, Joseph Cornell’s studio was a top destination for many in the art world. But not all were invited to the basement of his modest Dutch Colonial home on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. The painfully shy recluse extended the offer to very few—mainly women, who might furnish their male counterparts with a book and a seat at the kitchen table to wile away the time. But now, anyone can visit. Not the actual studio, of course, but a painstaking replica titled “The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson,” which is the brainchild of curator Jasper Sharp and the filmmaker and will occupy the storefront windows at Gagosian in Paris through March 14.

“He said let’s recreate the workshop and all of his tools and his table and his furniture,” Sharp recalls Anderson suggesting. “So, that’s what we’ve done. We loved the idea of doing it on street level, a storefront, and creating an exhibition that we never open the door to. It’s entirely consumed on the street.”

A famous hoarder, Cornell spent his days scouring secondhand stores, flea markets and other venues, choosing objects that caught his eye and storing them away for future use. The basement was more like a workshop than your average artist studio, packed to the rafters with items that might look like junk to anyone else, but to Cornell were sweet morsels which, when paired properly in one of his glass-fronted shadowboxes, conjured magic. Much like the artist’s own assemblages, the Gagosian installation paints a portrait of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures.

While recreating the studio might not sound like an overwhelming challenge, the project required arduous research, drawing on accounts from curators, friends, family members, assistants, and collectors. Sharp and his team relied on the few photos that existed, taken by people like Hans Namuth, Duane Michals, and most of all, Harry Roseman, who worked with the artist from 1969 until his death in 1972.

Famous from the photos is a shelving unit containing whitewashed boxes on which Cornell labeled the contents—owls, Caravaggio, watch parts, seashells—each reproduced in the artist’s hand by a pair of sign painters who work on Anderson’s movies. Another of Anderson’s crew, Catherine Little, was called upon to age items and recreate the walls, damp and damaged by the years.

“We have several hundred bits of printed material, a little box of Dutch clay pipes,” says Sharp, noting the inclusion of the artist’s typewriter and 16mm projector used to view titles from his oversized film collection from which he sometimes spliced disparate images and sequences, creating his own movies. “We have the most beautiful things from his studio and from his home, which are original. We’ve collected the records that Cornell had in his record collection. We’ve collected the exact editions of books on the moon, on the stars, that he had. These are not Cornell’s objects, but they’re exact equivalents.”

Original items from the Cornell studio came courtesy of a variety of sources, including the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Four unfinished Cornell works and a small selection of archival material and cutouts are on loan from the museum. Additionally, the installation includes 15 complete shadowboxes, one object and four collages interspersed among hundreds of historical items discovered by Sharp in secondhand shops and flea markets on several continents, as well as eBay, antiquarian booksellers and record dealers.

Also included is Pharmacy, modeled after an antique apothecary cabinet, owned by Teeny and Marcel Duchamp. Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) is from the artist’s celebrated Medici series, framing reproductions of Bernardino Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy behind amber-tinted glass, presented alongside wooden toys and maps of Italian streets. A Dressing Room for Gilles pays homage to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot, the original of which hangs just a few blocks away at Musée du Louvre. And Blériot II honors Louis Blériot, the first to make an engine-powered flight across the English Channel.

“There’s stuff everywhere, piles of National Geographic, aisles of film, he’s an absolute hoarder,” says Sharp, who mounted the 2015-2016 show, “Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust,” at Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum as well as London’s Royal Academy of Arts. “Everyone who went to the studio described it as beautifully organized chaos. He kept dossiers on dozens of individuals, some of whom he knew, some of whom he was friends with, and some of whom had died three hundred years prior. He kept dossiers on Dürer, he kept a dossier on Lauren Bacall for 30 years. And he was making these exquisitely poetic boxes which were aligning him more with European Surrealists, a label he rejected.”

Perhaps the most eccentric in a milieu full of eccentrics, Cornell lived his whole life in the same house and rarely ventured outside of New York City. One exception was attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. As a graduation gift, he was promised by his father a trip to Paris. But his father died soon thereafter, and Cornell, despite having reached his senior year, never graduated. Instead, he returned home to care for his mother and his younger brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy.

A voracious reader, Cornell was an armchair traveler, once describing specific sights in Paris to his friend Marcel Duchamp, who was surprised to later learn that Cornell had never visited the city. An autodidact, in his late 20s he began making collages and assemblages—boxes with items strategically placed within. Some of the items commented on or rhymed with others, some did not. But they were regarded as treasures by those who collected them, including figures like a young Yayoi Kusama, with whom he shared a platonic relationship. Once, when his mother caught them kissing, she is said to have thrown water on the couple.

In 1931, Cornell visited Julien Levy Gallery while Levy was unpacking new works by Surrealists like Max Ernst. Captivated, Cornell later brought his own collages to show Levy and was invited to join the gallery’s 1932 Surrealist exhibition. In addition to Levy, he later showed with gallerists like Richard Feigen and Leo Castelli.

Those who made the journey to Utopia Parkway include filmmaker and collector Billy Wilder, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of assemblage Cornell found kinship with, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Mark Rothko and Stan Brakhage. His artwork impacted that of people like Dorothea Tanning, Betye Saar, Octavio Paz and Louise Nevelson, among many others.

A transplant from Houston to Paris, Wes Anderson might have visited the house on Utopia Parkway had he not been born a mere three years before Cornell’s passing. Their work overlaps in movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel, the poster of which appears to be a tribute to Cornell’s castles and hotel pieces like Untitled (Pink Palace).

“It goes beyond the aesthetic, the narrative and storytelling, it’s a deeply layered relationship. And Wes, someone who’s grown up in the States and made a decision to live his life in Europe, when you look at his films, there’s certainly a kindred spirit,” notes Sharp, who refrained from referencing “pink palace” in the show, lest it shorthand their artistic kinship.

“He treasured as perhaps the last of his almost Edwardian youth, the right to be quietly eccentric,” wrote art critic Jed Perl, “to take a subtly ironic attitude toward a world that he observed with the friendly caution of a man who was glad to be here but also suspected that he was meant for another time and place.”

A devotee to opera and ballet, Cornell struck up friendships with dancers like Tamara Toumanova, Allegra Kent and Balanchine’s tragic muse, Tanaquil LeClercq, but never married and, by his own admission, died a virgin. His final sentiment, expressed to his sister, was one of a heart-wrenching regret: “I wish I had not been so reserved.”

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Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.

Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”

It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.

Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.

“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”

Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.

“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”

Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.

“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”

Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.

“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”

Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.

The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.

“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”

The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.

“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”

“Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse” is at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 25, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art
• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World
• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope
• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water
• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

Sometimes asthma is a good thing. If artist Robert Therrien didn’t suffer from it as a child, he might not have spent most of his time indoors, drawing and absorbing comic book images, and he might not have spent as much time surrounded by the shapes and objects we normally associate with domesticity, such as skillets, stacked dishes, a dining room table and chairs. These items make up just some of the artworks in the retrospective, “Robert Therrien: This is a Story” at L.A.’s the Broad through April 5.

“He was inside more and kind of a sickly kid,” Dean Anes, co-director of the artist’s estate and former Therrien liaison at Gagosian Beverly Hills, tells Observer. “Back then, in the comic books, there would be ‘Draw Tippy,’ a turtle with a hat, and he would draw those. This gameplay of drawing was also something he did as a child and continued into his work.”

Gathered here are some 120 artworks from the L.A.-based sculptor who passed in 2019. Included are artworks ranging from simple drawings, like those mentioned above, to No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown) (2007).

“There’s a great desire to see artists as illustrating their memories. Robert Therrien, for me, did not do that,” says Broad curator Ed Schad. “He took generative moments inside his own biography and used that as an opportunity to go and meet a visitor on terrain that is shared. So, even though the table held specific memories for him, that’s far, far less important than creating an object that held memories for you.”

One item that holds memories for this viewer is the logo of Underwood deviled ham, a red devil silhouette brandishing a pitchfork. It is a recurring motif in the show, found in the silkscreen, ink, bleach and graphite on paper, No title (devil thinking about three feet) from 1993, as well as No title (waving devil) from 1991, also on paper. While the latter is in black, the former is in red, and both are cousins of Therrien’s 1993 No title (devil wall), a silkscreen with an off-white background and five randomly spaced tiny devils. All bear some relationship to his No title (red dots panel), inspired by the dots he saw as a child after using his asthma inhaler.

Motifs are common in Therrien’s work, shapes that rhyme, like an oilcan and a chapel, both of which feature a large base with a long thin feeder or steeple. No title (blue chapel relief) from 1982 changed color a year later and became No title (bent cone relief), and later became No title (red chapel relief) in 1991, and No title (black witch hat) in 2018. Similarly, the snowman shape he created in the late 1970s, a stand-in for the human form, when turned on its side became a cloud in 1981 and, later, smoke signals.

“He spoke about the subjects as the more ties and strings of meaning for him, the more interesting they were for him,” says Paul Cherwick, co-director of the Robert Therrien Estate and the artist’s assistant of 17 years. “He didn’t read them one way or another. He saw them in multitudes.”

It’s one of the reasons he left most of his works untitled. “He was very cloaked about the true meaning behind those things,” says Anes, noting a connection to Marcel Duchamp, who likewise found inspiration in quotidian items. “He never divulged that as part of what you were supposed to understand or take away. You were supposed to figure that out for yourself. He could have been making statements with it, but he preferred to have people come and realize what they’re thinking about it as opposed to his take on it.”

At the age of 21, Therrien attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and opened a studio in Berkeley. He later studied printmaking at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and painting at the Santa Barbara Art Institute. In 1971, he moved to L.A. and pursued a master’s at USC. A year later, he moved into his studio at 5084 West Pico, a storefront with a living space upstairs.

A landmark year came in 1985 when he participated in the Whitney Biennial with No title (iron snowman) and No title (bent cone). That same year, he showed at Gagosian in L.A. and began his relationship with Leo Castelli in New York City.

Five years later, Therrien moved into a custom-built studio near USC on West 37th Place, which he modeled after his former studio. The larger space had a direct impact on his work. Mainly, things got bigger. Within five years, he made Under the Table, which was exhibited at Carnegie International but was preemptively purchased by the Broad Art Foundation.

In 1998, he made No title (black beds), two plastic and enamel beds placed end to end, curling upward in an arch, which appeared in the artist’s 2000 LACMA show highlighting the change in his work since the 1990 move. Its cousin, No title (large telephone cloud), a steel and enamel snarl of telephone and cords, was made the same year. Both inspired No title (large metal squiggle), a steel sculpture of looped wire from 2017.

“It really did open up the scale when he went to 7,000 square feet,” says Anes about the new studio. “We’re talking about the time when the galleries were really sizing up their works. I know there was a push to create larger things for the greater art world and institutions. His answer was to go supersize and create an environment.”

Oversized pieces in the show include No title (stacked plates), a classic from 1992, as well as No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown) and No title (disc cart III, grotty), which resembles a drying rack for oversized plates.

“Most of the sculptural tradition is about monuments, putting a person on horseback, up on a pedestal to loom over you from a powerful position,” observes Schad. “It’s profound to think that something of size can be about individual human responses to sizes. That it’s not about the powerful figures, it’s not about history, it’s not about religion, it’s about you inhabiting your life, your body, your memories.”

Among the largest works in the show is an oversized beard made of stainless steel. It sits in a gallery with smaller beards made of synthetic hair or plastic, a motif that emerged around 1999. Inspired by Constantin Brancusi, it’s not the only piece he made that was dedicated to the pioneering modernist. No title (linear bird panel) is an oil on cardboard tribute to Brancusi’s most famous bronze, Bird in Space (1928).

To meet city codes, the studio near USC required space for an indoor dumpster. The wasted space inspired No title (room, pots and pans I), resembling an enormous pantry stuffed with oversized pots and pans, enclosed by a Dutch door, a recurring subject in his practice based on a feature in his grandparents’ home he recalled from childhood. Red Room is a mixed media piece with approximately 888 red objects stuffed into the closet-sized space. No title (room, panic doors) is a related piece but is less like a closet than an institutional space with naked walls and a fluorescent light.

“To the outside world, he was definitely an introvert and not the life of the party. In his studio was the place where he was comfortable. There, you would have long conversations about literature, poetry, music, gossip, all kinds of things,” notes Anes, who along with Cherwick, lost a close friend when Therrien passed in 2019. “He was a very interesting and engaging guy.”

More exhibition reviews

• “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art

• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

The year of the Guerrilla—that’s what 2025 is. Not the insurgent kind with a gun in her hand, but the artistic kind with a paintbrush. The Guerrilla Girls, the witty and irreverent activist movement battling sexism in the art world, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with shows in D.C., London, Germany and Norway. Their largest retrospective, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” is at L.A.’s Getty Research Institute through April 26, 2026.

“Our exhibition is drawn from the archives, housed here at the GRI. That’s really the cornerstone in addition to more contemporary works that are on loan,” says co-curator Kristin Juarez about the show, which brings together posters, planning documents and ephemera. “It tells the story of how they worked together, how these works came to be, giving a behind-the-scenes look at their collaboration and how they thought through these processes.”

A newly commissioned work for the exhibition explores the Getty’s collection of European painting and sculpture depicting violence against women. It’s introduced with a text that says, “Too much violence in our culture today? Take a look at these old masterpieces.”

Familiar figures are presented in a single composition, each with comic strip-like speech bubbles. Included is Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold (1622), where a nude Danaë, imprisoned by her father, reaches up toward a gold torrent symbolizing Zeus. The captions tell her story, ending with the comment: “The artist showed me naked and willing when in fact I’m a prisoner being raped.” Nearby is Lucretia, painted by Orazio’s daughter, Artemisia. The scene of this Roman noblewoman’s rape is a subject Gentileschi often returned to after her own experience being raped by fellow artist Agostino Tassi, who spent less than a year in prison for his crime.

Also included is an oversized version of the Mona Lisa with a fig leaf covering her mouth, part of their billboard, First They Want to Take Away a Woman’s Right to Choose…Now They’re Censoring Art. The show wouldn’t be complete without a copy of their 1989 billboard, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?, which depicts Ingres’ Grande Odalisque wearing a gorilla mask. Included are statistics noting that 5 percent of paintings in the museum’s modern art section are painted by women, while 85 percent of the nudes are women. Included are early designs for the billboard, as well as updated versions from 2005 and 2012.

“What the Guerrilla Girls were doing is collecting the evidence,” says Juarez, noting how data has been essential to their message, exhibited here in archival photographs, annotated charts, research files and handwritten tallies. “So, when they’re developing posters that look at galleries and collections, they can say, ‘No, it hasn’t changed, or maybe it has.’ The methodology is relevant in holding institutions accountable.”

The statistics indicate chronic underrepresentation, the result of ingrained ideas formed through an old-boys-club mentality. Wealthy collectors, many of whom sit on the boards at major cultural institutions, favor works that mirror their own ideas and worldviews. “The system of legitimization within the art world is a problem,” says co-curator Zanna Gilbert. “The Guerrilla Girls are interested in promoting different ideas of what art is and can be: What is genius, and what is art for? It can be for creating community. The values that underpin our art world can also be changed.”

The group leads by example, lowballing their posters, although they could charge more. “They’ve never created a situation where they are making their work inaccessible, limiting circulation to make it more valuable, which is what the art world tends to do,” adds Gilbert.

It began in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when a group of women (future founding members) protested an exhibition that featured only 13 women out of 169 artists. The response was vague curiosity and a collective yawn. In their frustration, they realized that a concerted effort was needed to change attitudes about equal representation in art.

Women artists began holding formal meetings in lofts and studios, eventually creating a poster campaign that would blanket the city, and they held art institutions and galleries accountable. Concerned that their activism might damage their reputations, participants donned gorilla masks and used aliases. Employing eye-catching design and advertising techniques, statistics and humor, they painted the town in wheatpaste posters. “We’ve encouraged our gallery to show more women of color, have you?” queried a letter sent to prominent male artists in the 1980s. Responders signed an agreement, and their names appeared on posters advocating for greater representation.

One of the group’s most famous posters ironically lists the advantages of being a woman artist, items like “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty” and “Having more time to work after your mate dumps you for someone younger” or “Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.” Early drafts of the list accompany it, with one including a list of advantages to being a male artist, among them, “Being considered a ‘good investment’.”

“That’s something we show—the process by which a poster would come to be,” Gilbert says. “They had to agree; it was consensus-based. There were a lot of ideas that didn’t make it onto the final poster. But if they agreed on something, then people would come with different ideas, and they would hash it out together, brainstorming and whittling these things down.”

Membership in the group rotated continuously, but members were always anonymous, borrowing monikers from historically underrepresented artists like Frida Kahlo and German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz. Members contributed in any way they could. One founding member had a background in advertising, so she worked on designing posters. Others performed menial tasks, such as going through the mail. Some focused on guerrilla actions at universities or booking TV appearances and getting the word out.

“If we believe in art and the power of art, then we also need to listen to it and help it affect change in our own institutions,” offers Gilbert. “I think there’s a really intransigent part of the art world that we see 40 years after the Guerrilla Girls started. Maybe it hasn’t changed all that much, the most market-driven part of the art world. But certainly institutions have changed and have better representation of women artists and artists of color.”

Over the past year, artists such as Lucy Bull, Firelei Báez, Frida Kahlo and Jadé Fadojutimi have set auction records, perhaps due in part to the efforts of the Guerrilla Girls. Juarez sees changes throughout the art world, although change can be frustratingly slow. “To be relevant,” she says of the establishment. “They need to be engaging with and showing work that represents the communities they’re a part of.”

Sometimes a headache is a good thing, and sometimes a migraine is a message from God. At least that’s what Hildegard of Bingen thought. Often called the Sybil of the Rhine, she was a mystic, visionary, writer, composer, philosopher and medical practitioner. Subject to visions, she was a 12th-century German Renaissance woman before such a thing existed.

“From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even to the present time,” she wrote toward the end of her life. “The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it ‘the reflection of the living Light.’ And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.”

Speculation varies on Hildegard’s affliction, some calling it divine manifestation, and the more scientifically inclined calling it epilepsy, autism or as neurologist Oliver Sacks opined in his 1970 book Migraine, “migraine with aura.” It’s what drew composer and fellow migraine sufferer Sarah Kirkland Snider to Hildegard.

“I wanted this to be an opera about what it means to be yourself when being yourself comes into conflict with socially conditioned notions of right and wrong,” Snider tells Observer about her first opera, HILDEGARD, which had its world premiere yesterday as part of LA Opera’s Off Grand series highlighting new works, running through November 9 at The Wallis in Beverly Hills. “I wanted to write an opera that was not only about Hildegard but about female relationships, collaborative, empowering relationships.”

One empowering relationship is that which Snider shares with visionary producer Beth Morrison, who strongly believed in the composer’s first opera effort after falling in love with her Penelope, a 2010 song cycle based on Homer’s Odyssey.

“I’m so proud of her,” Morrison says of Snider. “It’s been totally a labor of love. She loves Hildegard so much, the historical figure, and she’s written such a beautiful piece. And I can’t wait to share it with everybody.”

Snider’s music has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Emerson String Quartet and soprano Renée Fleming in venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center and the Sydney Opera House. Much of her work has centered around chamber ensemble compositions, orchestral and, lately, choral and sacred music like her 2020 album Mass for the Endangered. Despite her many accomplishments, opera remained a mountain yet unscaled.

“I’m actually not a big opera fan,” she confesses, which might explain why she’s taken so long to compose one. “It either seems overblown, and kind of blustery and ridiculous, or it seems not immersive or emotional enough. With a lot of modern operas, I have a hard time relating to the characters. So, I wanted to make things immersive and emotional and relatable.”

HILDEGARD director Elkhanah Pulitzer, who regularly collaborates with composer John Adams, recently helmed his Antony and Cleopatra at the Met. Her LA Opera productions include Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 2014. For Hildegard, she envisions a blend of influences inspired by medieval religious paintings and iconography, as well as a minimalist take on Hildegard’s own artwork.

Leading a cast of nine, soprano Nola Richardson makes her LA Opera debut as Hildegard, accompanied by soprano Mikaela Bennett as Richardus. Veteran baritone David Adam Moore, seen earlier this year in Beth Morrison Productions’ Adoration, plays Hildegard’s superior, Abbot Cuno.

In her early fifties, Hildegard met and cared for Sister Richardus, an epileptic who endured the era’s best-known cure for her affliction—severe beatings meant to drive out malignant spirits. In return for Hildegard’s kindness, Richardus transcribed her visions for presentation to the pope. If they were not approved, Hildegard faced excommunication, making the opera’s principal conflict one of the individual versus an entrenched power structure. But there’s more—rape, disinterment, accidental suicide and a faceless angel, to name some.

Morrison introduced Snider to two librettists early in a process that began eight years ago. Librettos are commonly written by poets, who are adroit at saying a lot in a few words. Snider recalls hearing a frequent refrain: “You’ve got a lot of ideas here, you should really write this yourself.”

“I felt so much self-doubt,” she shudders. “But then when I started getting the music involved, that really helped shape the libretto. The challenge I had was only nine instruments to work with. For me, that’s a relatively small ensemble. And for a two-hour opera, I think the challenges were mostly just how to keep interest sustained, how to find peaks and valleys and keep this thing levitating all the way through.”

Morrison had concerns but stood behind Snider in her effort to write her own libretto, bringing in dramaturg Annie Jin Wang and the director Elkhanah Pulitzer to assist. “So, when she kind of settled into herself with it, and found her confidence, then she was able to really write this very, very beautiful narrative and language that is the libretto that we have today,” Morrison recalls.

It wasn’t just the libretto that pushed Snider to her limit. There were multiple workshops and meetings, eviscerating her words and music, a process she found “grueling and decimating.”

“Emotionally, I’m constantly getting torn down and having to build myself back up, my confidence and conviction,” she laments. “Arguing with a group about my ideas, that’s not easy. I’ve developed some battle scars.”

With that in mind, one might assume that HILDEGARD will be Snider’s first and last opera. But no, she says she can’t wait to do another. “Writing a two-and-a-half-hour opera gets you thinking on a bigger canvas, bigger storylines,” she offers. “I’m always trying to make musical connections and have motivic repetition, but it’s not easy to do that over the course of two and a half hours. I want music to tell the story and help orient the listener. For me, it’s a lot of referencing your own materials in ways that keep it fresh and changing, and use new harmonic color to shape the ever-evolving emotion of the characters. It’s something I haven’t done before on that scale.”

HILDEGARD will be presented as part of Beth Morrison Productions’ Prototype Festival in January, and at the Aspen Music Festival Summer 2026. Also coming early next year is Snider’s new orchestral album Forward Into Light, as well as an untitled new work for the New World Symphony and the Miami City Ballet premiering in April. After that, she will introduce Marmoris with the Monterey Symphony in May.

“I’m always trying to push in new directions with my music and try to lean into my fears, cause I feel like interesting things can happen there,” she says. “I have grown so much through this process. We have this idea that as we get older, we get entrenched, we calcify with our ideas and our ways of doing things. With this opera, it’s been the opposite for me. I’ve pulled all the cells out of my body and put in new ones. And I feel younger and more alive, creatively, than I ever have before. That has been really wonderful and really exciting.”

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Some say it began in 2015, when Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed nine worshippers in cold blood. According to survivors of the massacre, before opening fire, Roof told them, “Y’all are raping our women, and y’all are taking over the country, and you have to go.”

It surprised few that racism was alive and well in the U.S., but many were shocked at the overt racism that characterized Donald Trump’s first term, notably when he referred to white supremacists as “some very fine people” following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left one dead. On that night in 2017, white supremacists gathered around a monument of Stonewall Jackson, mounted on his horse. Such tributes to Confederate figures had become targets of groups like Black Lives Matter and others who saw them as symbols of a racist cause defending the Confederacy’s “peculiar institution” of slavery. Since then, roughly 300 monuments have been decommissioned in cities across the U.S., most of them in the South.

Those who take pride in the Confederacy’s Lost Cause argue that decommissioning public monuments amounts to erasure. But the only thing being erased with the show, “Monuments” at MOCA Geffen and The Brick through May 3, 2026, is the myth of valor. “These objects are not history. They have a history. But these objects are about myth,” says The Brick curator Hamza Walker, who teamed with MOCA’s Bennett Simpson on the show. “People talk about recontextualization. So, putting plaques next to them, that’s one thing, more didactic materials.” That’s what W.E.B. Du Bois had in mind when he argued in a 1931 issue of The Crisis: “If Confederate monuments had told the truth, they would have included inscriptions that read: ‘Sacred to the memory of those who fought to perpetuate human slavery.’”

The MOCA Geffen houses 18 decommissioned monuments, including bronze ingots that were once a figure of Robert E. Lee, standing proudly in Charlottesville. Many bear the marks of ignoble demise, like the red paint veiling Beaux-Arts master Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl’s 1903 piece, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Like the rest, its presence is powerfully imposing within the confines of a gallery. Recontextualizing these monuments are commissioned artworks by practitioners such as Bethany Collins, Abigail DeVille, Karon Davis, Stan Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, Cauleen Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Walter Price, Davóne Tines, Julie Dash and Kara Walker. Additional artworks by Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Hugh Mangum, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano and Hank Willis Thomas are on loan from private collectors and art institutions.

Sculptor J. Maxwell Miller’s 1917 monument, Confederate Women of Maryland, stands in conversation with Jon Henry’s Stranger Fruit series of photos that pose Black mothers with their fallen sons in Pietà-like compositions that mimic the monument, giving voice to the many who have lost loved ones through violence and institutional racism.

A powerful counterbalance to all of the monuments is Hugh Mangum’s 1910 portrait series of average African American citizens, nameless here but seen in a way that was rare in the Jim Crow South, when most of the monuments were erected. Mangum’s photos stand in stark contrast to Andres Serrano’s color portraits of anonymous Klansmen who, in their shame, hide behind hoods. A rebuke lies in Edward V. Valentine’s pink-splattered likeness of Jefferson Davis from 1907, which used to stand in Richmond, Virginia.

Proponents of the Lost Cause argue that the war had nothing to do with slavery, noting that only 5.67 percent of the white population were enslavers and that the conflict was over states’ rights and safeguarding Southern culture. This insignificant percentage ignores the fact that adjustments accounting for the family unit would put enslavers closer to 30.8 percent, and roughly 50 percent in South Carolina and Mississippi. Without slavery, the Southern economy was unsustainable. Others argue that plantation life was characterized by bucolic peace and harmony. Such nostalgia for a fictional time and place was captured in silhouettes of the era, often depicting children at play and contented workers in the fields. In artist Kara Walker’s hands, such nostalgia is shattered by silhouettes of graphic violence and rape committed against slaves, powerfully belying the myth behind the Lost Cause and confronting viewers with the truth.

It’s what makes Walker the perfect candidate to take on the Stonewall Jackson monument that stood at the heart of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. She and her team disassembled the bronze sculpture, then reassembled it as a grotesque centaur, combining elements of Jackson with those of his gelding, Little Sorrel.

“I wanted to deal with the material in a way that was also about the act of separation—separating man from horse and man from myth,” Walker said in an interview with Hamza about the new piece entitled Unmanned Drone. “The stuff we’re parsing through—the Lost Cause, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, these symbolic assertions of white supremacy—it’s in the bloodstream, in a way. That’s really a horror.”

The Trump administration has appointed only two Black people among the 98 Senate-confirmed nominees for major government departments. It has attacked cultural and educational institutions that support DEI initiatives and has targeted agencies with many minority workers for cuts, disproportionately affecting Black federal employees. This comes at a time when the Supreme Court is believed to be poised to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, effectively nullifying Black votes through redistricting. The current iteration of racial strife might have begun with Dylann Roof, but its roots go back all the way to 1619 and the arrival of the first slaves on U.S. soil.

“Sometimes you’re not even aware of the ebb and flow. And suddenly, to watch the dismantling of things that I thought were sacrosanct, that’s the ebb and flow. This moment connects also to that larger arch,” offers Hamza. “The Lost Cause as an ideology is still here.”

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• Tavares Strachan’s ‘The Day Tomorrow Began’ Reveals Invisible Histories Through Reimagined Realities

• ‘Jon Rafman’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Not even historic wildfires and a year of ICE roundups could stop “Made in LA,” the Hammer Museum’s biennial pulse check on the art scene in Los Angeles, on through March 1, 2026. This year, 28 artists were chosen by Art Institute of Chicago and former Hammer curator Paulina Pobocha and independent curator Essence Harden. “We did our studio visits in 2024, and we saw too many people and so many varieties of work that I would say it was very difficult to find a genre or category that seemed to exist or have a larger presence than any other. The distribution of genres and mediums is really broad,” Pobocha tells Observer.

Harden was drawn to the work of Amanda Ross-Ho for her emphasis on object and place. Visits to the studios of sculptor Pat O’Neill and Carl Cheng, with his “nature machines” and pseudo-appliances, left them gobsmacked, as did experimental film Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View) by Mike Stoltz, commissioned later for the show. “His work is so engaging, in a multifaceted media-analog way,” says Harden. “Those things surprised me, like a lot of people whom we stumbled upon and then were blown away when we got to the studio.”

Artist Leilah Weinraub’s work The Kids integrates video and performance in her imaginative study of the often ornate building facades of Lower Manhattan. She’s also teamed with theatermakers Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel of Hollywood’s New Theater for their film THEATER, a silent movie shot in 16mm. “Experimental avant-garde theater has a very long history in Germany and Weimar Germany between the wars. A lot of the people who ran those theaters were Jews who emigrated to Los Angeles and started the entertainment industry,” Pobocha says of the Pitegoff and Henkel, who managed several noteworthy bar and theater spaces in Berlin, including TV Bar and Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne. “There’s a generational structure connecting a place like Berlin to L.A. There are actors everywhere, making movies, but there’s not much theater going on. So, what they’re doing is deeply rooted in the history of the city.”

In THEATER, Weinraub stars as an Uber driver in L.A. who gets hit by a city bus and receives a payout from the state. With her newfound fortune, she decides to start a theater and assembles an acting ensemble. She soon runs out of money and starts living in the theater. Hitting rock bottom, she rents it out. Henkel and Pitegoff used rehearsal footage of productions they staged in the theater for the film.

“It definitely pulls from the world around us,” says Henkel. “We are obsessed with the acting classes in the neighborhood. We filmed them painting the building red, and in the film, a character pays to paint the building red. We fill in and shoot this narrative when we can, and then at a certain point, we edit it together. The theater next door that was there when we were working on the film is now closed and gutted. So, it’s a lot of documenting other spaces.”

New Theater Hollywood is named for an establishment they had in Berlin. The L.A. iteration is housed in a historic 49-seat black box theater on the Theater Row section of Santa Monica Boulevard, a dilapidated stretch in Hollywood. “In Germany, theater is the most direct way, as an art form, to speak to the people,” says Henkel. “There, everyone goes to the theater. It’s really set up so that people of all backgrounds go. You can stand up in the middle and say, ‘fuck this,’ and walk out. It is state-funded. It allows for experimentation, artistry on an amazing level.”

Originally from Chicago, artist Amanda Ross-Ho relocated to L.A. 20 years ago to attend grad school at USC and currently teaches at UC Irvine. For her 2008 California Biennial piece Frauds for an Inside Job, she transported the actual walls of her East L.A. studio into the galleries of the Orange County Museum of Art. The nine panels stood 11 feet tall, the same height as the four panels of her “Made in L.A.” installation Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS). “There are relationships with scale that not a lot of people have the capacity to do, and recovering her own personal history, but not in a way that felt obvious in terms of the texture itself,” says Harden. “We invited her because we were interested in her way of thinking through objects and space that I haven’t seen that much of.”

Ross-Ho turned tragedy into triumph when her father, artist Ruyell Ho, was hit by a car in 2020 and injured his head and hip. Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) is composed of four scaled-up versions of the door to his room in a medical facility. Each represents a different season through holiday decorations—Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, July 4, and Halloween.

“Decorations mark time for patients with memory issues, dementia,” says Ross-Ho, who worked as a propmaker in Hollywood when she first moved to L.A. “I was interested in creating this thing where you saw the walls as an artifact that was kind of ripped out. Displacement is a factor. This is all prop making. I wanted you to feel like these doors were pulled out and set into the place.”

Like most of “Made in LA,” Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) is not overtly political in our current polarized era. But viewers who dig deeper will find elements that comment on the hostility immigrants are facing nationwide. “For me, this isn’t extraordinarily political but is oblique,” she says. “My dad was an immigrant and had this incredible life of overcoming all sorts of things, not just to survive but mostly being free. And in this medical facility are the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, the most without. And this is a Medicare unit. They’re on the chopping block.”

In a time when caring and compassion are somehow considered radical acts, Ross-Ho’s work takes on political undertones. In a time when ethnic subject matter is considered woke, Patrick Martinez’s epic piece, Battle of the City on Fire, depicting Mayan murals as street art, becomes political. And Bruce Yonemoto’s Broken Fences, juxtaposing footage of Japanese American prisoners interned during World War II with Jews in Nazi death camps, is political in any era.

“This thing happening now in the United States is not ahistorical. Even ICE itself is not an invention of Donald Trump,” observes Pobocha. “From ICE raids in L.A. to so many current government policies, these are returning crises not only in the United States but in Los Angeles. I think these artists are students of history.”

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