10 Art Shows to See in Los Angeles This December

This month’s shows span the aquatic, familial, and celestial to engage with tradition and history, tracing threads of connection in some cases and challenging the old orders in others. Eden reimagines the biblical garden as a radical paradise for queer and trans liberation, while Andrés Janacua and Miller Robinson draw on Indigenous techniques and perspectives in their poetic, autobiographical works. Shiva Ahmadi’s watercolors incorporate Persian myths with the contemporary history of Iran, and Umar Rashid’s epic postmodern history paintings offer an alternate timeline of the Americas in which the colonizers get their comeuppance — and the vanquished become the victors.

Eden

Last Projects, 206 South Avenue 20, Lincoln Heights, Los AngelesThrough December 13

Kyle Patrick Roberts, Leisure Ephemera (2024), 6 x 8 inches each (~15.2 x 20.3 cm) (image courtesy Last Projects)

Eden is an abundant group show that reimagines the biblical Garden of Eden as a site of queer and trans liberation. Curated by Emily Lucid, the exhibition features a diverse array of media, including painting, sculpture, video, photography, and performance, forming aesthetic and conceptual connections like creeping vines. A few notable works include Poodle’s (also known as RB Moran) assemblage fountain, “Stop Looking At My Dick” (2024); Genevive Belleveau’s “Your Master Gardner” Fetish Wear (2024); Jules Garder’s ceramic Big Boot (2023); and Charles Kelman’s untitled concrete and steel light rig that transforms the modest storefront gallery into an exuberant dancefloor.

Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 5247 West Adams Boulevard, West Adams, Los AngelesThrough December 21

Shiva Ahmadi, “Octopus” (2024), watercolor on paper, 22 1/2 x 15 inches (57.2 x 38.1 cm) (image courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery)

Iranian-born American artist Shiva Ahmadi’s fantastical watercolors draw on artistic traditions and mythologies from Iran, Southwest Asia, and North Africa, resulting in symbolic paintings grounded in the real world. The works in Tangle depict female figures in botanic or aquatic environments, their hair flowing out in waves of energy, connecting them to surrounding flora and fauna. These ethereal paintings are accompanied by hand-etched pressure cookers, alluding to the domestic toll of regional conflicts, and the captivating animated film “Marooned” (2021), whose story conveys universal themes of hope, betrayal, and resilience.

Umar Rashid: The Kingdom of the Two Californias. La Época del Totalitarismo Part 2.

Blum, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City, Los AngelesThrough December 21

Umar Rashid, “Hunters and Sirens (Santa Barbara)” (2024), acrylic and ink on canvas 72 1/8 x 84 1/8 x 1 1/2 inches (183.2 x 213.7 x 3.8 cm) (© 2024 Umar Rashid; photo by Hannah Mjølsnes, courtesy the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York)

This is the second chapter of Umar Rashid’s ongoing epic series The Epoch of Totalitarianism, which follows fictional colonizers, the “Frenglish,” as they struggle to extend their empire across the Americas during the 19th century. Rashid’s imagined narrative, which he has been constructing for the past 15 years, fuses history painting with sci-fi, cartoon imagery, graffiti, and car culture. These anachronistic, revisionist scenes wrestle with dark episodes of repression and genocide in our nation’s history and trace their echoes through to the present day.

Andrés Janacua: My Dad Drips

839, 839 North Cherokee Avenue, Hollywood, Los AngelesThrough December 21

Andrés Janacua, “TruncatedPalate” (2024), toquillo weaving in a cedar artist’s frame, 32 7/8 x 27 1/4 inches (~83.5 x 69.2 cm) (photo by Kyle Tata, courtesy 839)

P’Urhépecha artist Andrés Janacua’s woven works navigate between craft and fine art, tradition and fashion. Working predominantly with toquillo, or plastic lanyard material, Janacua weaves patterns that recall Minimalism and geometric abstraction, as well as Indigenous designs and art forms. The exhibition’s title, My Dad Drips, symbolizes these manifold references, suggesting a visceral connection to family and a stylish extravagance, or “drip.”

Miller Robinson: Innies, Outies and Inbetweenies

Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, 7424 Beverly Boulevard, Fairfax, Los AngelesThrough December 21

Miller Robinson, “Pillow No. 2 (Abalone with compass)” (2023), silicone, pigment, tar, trash. gauze, concrete, medical glass, syringe, synthetic hormones, and duck feather, 9 x 23 x 14 1/2 inches (~22.9 x 58.4 x 36.8 cm) (photo by ofphotostudio, courtesy Timothy Hawkinson Gallery)

Miller Robinson is driven by a boundless material curiosity, incorporating natural materials, industrially manufactured objects, pharmaceuticals, bodily fluids, plants, and handcrafts into its sculptural assemblages. (Robinson is a two-spirit artist of Karuk, Yurok, and mixed European descent who uses it/its/itself pronouns.) Its heterodox juxtapositions are intimately autobiographical in a poetic rather than narrative way, revealing facets of the artist’s identity, heritage, and how it relates to others and the earth. Salmon skin and silicone, glass, tar, blood, feathers, and clay all play roles in Robinson’s cosmology, tracing delicate webs of community and care.

Dave Smith: L.A. BOUND: Paintings from the 1990s

The Trophy Room LA, 4134 Verdugo Road, Glassell Park, Los AngelesThrough December 21

Dave Smith, “It Takes A Lot Of Lights To Make A City #2” (1994), acrylic on canvas, 24 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches (61 × 182.9 × 3.8 cm) (image courtesy Dave Smith and The Trophy Room LA)

When British-born artist Dave Smith moved to Los Angeles in 1990, he became fascinated by the city’s contradictions. He worked as a billboard painter and scenic artist in Hollywood, while at the same time exploring LA’s multifarious identities in his own paintings, juxtaposing hazy sunsets, palm trees, urban sprawl, and the ubiquitous grids of signs advertising nail salons, pizza parlors, liquor stores, and gun shops. L.A. Bound presents a shrewd vision of the city from the perspective of a wide-eyed recent arrival.

Erica Ryan Stallones: Three’s a Crowd

Central Server Works, 334 Main Street, Downtown, Los AngelesThrough December 22

Erica Ryan Stallones, “The thing about my family” (2024), oil on canvas, 3o x 3o inches (76.2 x 76.2 cm) (photo by Joshua Oduga, courtesy the artist and Central Server Works)

LA artist Erica Ryan Stallones examines the bonds and stresses of family and community, specifically in the context of motherhood. The eight new paintings in Three’s a Crowd address these themes through a filter of fantasy and sci-fi, with an air of nostalgia for 1970s afternoon TV movies. In “We get together” (2024), a group of aliens sits around a living room, sipping coffee and avoiding each other’s glances, while the green-skinned relatives in “The thing about my family” (2024) are supernaturally peculiar, rather than conventionally dysfunctional.

Candida Höfer: Europa / America

Sean Kelly, 1357 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los AngelesThrough January 11, 2025

Candida Höfer, “Masonic Temple Philadelphia I” (2007), C-print, 70 7/8 x 95 5/16 inches (180 x 242 cm) (© Candida Höfer, Köln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024; image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles)

German photographer Candida Höfer is best known for her breathtaking, vibrant images of interior spaces, characterized by the technical precision and formal rigor of the Düsseldorf School. Curated by architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Europa / America features 10 photographs taken between 1993 and 2015 that capture culturally and architecturally significant buildings on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Teatro Comunale di Carpi in Italy, and the Benediktinerstift Altenburg monastery in Austria. Although ostensibly devoid of people, the images of these pristine, airless spaces speak volumes about the societies that created them.

Laugh, Cry, Fight!… with the Guerrilla Girls

Beyond the Streets, 434 North La Brea Avenue, Fairfax, Los AngelesThrough January 18, 2025

Installation view of Laugh, Cry, Fight!… Wwth the Guerrilla Girls (photo by ofphotostudio, courtesy Beyond the Streets)

For nearly 40 years, the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls has used subversive humor and irreverence to challenge gender and race-based inequities of the institutional art world. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Laugh, Cry, Fight!… with the Guerrilla Girls marks the anonymous group’s first solo show on the West Coast. The exhibition includes street posters, banners, video, and installations spanning their entire career, from historic campaigns to new work, illustrating the enduring need for their irreverent variety of prankster activism.

Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect

Pace, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Mid-Wilshire, Los AngelesThrough January 18, 2025

Loie Hollowell, “Overview Effect in yellow and blue with large mandorla” (2024), oil paint, acrylic medium, and high-density foam on linen over panel, 96 x 72 x 4 1/2 inches (243.8 x 182.9 x 11.4 cm) (© Loie Hollowell; image courtesy Pace Gallery)

Overview Effect, Loie Hollowell’s first show in Southern California, showcases six new colossal paintings exploring color and geometry through overlapping circular forms, which appear to extend from the canvas in three dimensions. Named for the astronomical phenomenon of viewing the Earth from space, the eight-by-six-foot works suggest celestial as well as physical bodies, specifically during pregnancy and childbirth, common themes across Hollowell’s oeuvre. Postpartum bodies inspired the artist to create an accompanying suite of 16 small paintings, featuring casts of the nipples of her breastfeeding friends.

Matt Stromberg is a freelance visual arts writer based in Los Angeles. In addition to Hyperallergic, he has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, CARLA, Apollo, ARTNews, and other publications.
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📅 Published on: 2024-12-01 23:03:00

🖋️ Author: Matt Stromberg – An expert in architectural innovation and design trends.

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