This fall, museums around Los Angeles are showcasing art’s ability to foster community, to rage against injustice, and to rewrite history. A historical survey of Mail Art in Latin America highlights subversive networks of artistic production in the face of political repression, while a traveling exhibition of radical Chicano prints from the Smithsonian lands at the Huntington. A show at the Getty pulls from the Guerrilla Girls’ archive, and a two-person exhibition at Skirball pairs the late Philip Guston with contemporary painter Trenton Doyle Hancock. The timely show Monuments, co-organized by the Brick and the Museum of Contemporary Art, juxtaposes decommissioned US monuments with work by artists engaging with current debates over how we want to reimagine our nation’s history. Ken Gonzales-Day and Tavares Strachan both engage in research-based practices that scrutinize who and what gets written into — and out of — mainstream narratives.
Flesh of the Forest
Oxy Arts, 4757 York Boulevard, Highland Park, Los Angeles | Through December 13
Flesh of the Forest brings together work by nine contemporary Black artists who focus on the forest as a complex site of liberation, danger, history, and boundless possibility. Curated by Tiffany E. Barber, the exhibition features wide-ranging portrayals of the wilderness as a surreal, liminal space where historical realities and speculative fictions coexist. Highlights include Alicia Piller’s maximalist assemblages built from the landscape of LA; Josèfa Ntjam’s video “Matter Gone Wild” (2023) that draws on gaming, mycology, and cosmic exploration; Reuben Telushkin’s kinetic sculpture connecting global struggles for freedom; and Simphiwe Ndzube’s fantastical mixed-media installations rooted in his childhood experience of post-Apartheid South Africa.
Guadalupe Maravilla: Les soñadores
REDCAT, 631 West 2nd Street, Downtown, Los Angeles | September 13–December 19
Guadalupe Maravilla fled his native El Salvador as a child during its bloody civil war, arriving in the US as an unaccompanied child. He later survived cancer, a disease he attributes to the trauma of violence, migration, and his previously undocumented status. Les soñadores, his first solo show in LA, includes sculptures that reflect his personal history of upheaval and resilience. These include “Migratory Birds Riding the Celestial Serpent (Aves migratorias montando la serpiente celestial)” (2021), an undulating serpentine form that incorporates objects picked up on a recreation of his migration path, and “Dream Backpacks” made from volcanic rock, which merge precolonial sculptural precedents with contemporary narratives of diasporic dislocation. REDCAT will host a screening and conversation between the artist, the Dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts Steven Lam, and its own Chief Curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar on September 13 at 6pm.
Made in L.A. 2025
The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles | October 5–March 1, 2026
The seventh edition of the Hammer’s LA biennial features 28 artists living and working in the City of Angels. Across film, painting, choreography, photography, sculpture, and sound, they capture something of the city’s “cacophonous disorder,” as curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha note. Participating artists include Ali Eyal, Patrick Martinez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Carl Cheng, Gabriela Ruiz, Will Rawls, and Hanna Hur, among others.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1717 East 7th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles | October 11–March 1, 2026
The Awake Volcanoes marks the first solo US museum show dedicated to the work of Chilean-born artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, featuring around 200 drawings, photographs, paintings, and paper sculptures. The artist grew up under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet before settling in Germany in the 1990s, and her work often engages with themes of violence, repression, and freedom. In her vibrant and visionary paintings, she draws parallels between the female body and the lands, where bodily forms double as mountains or rolling hills. Drawing on spirituality, myth, and psychological themes, she imagines a hopeful world characterized by perseverance in the wake of trauma.
Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles | October 12–March 29, 2025
Invisibility is a central theme of Tavares Strachan’s multi-faceted practice, specifically as it relates to the erasure of Black figures and experiences from mainstream histories. Operating at the intersection of art and science, he has excavated and shipped a two-and-a-half-ton block of Arctic ice to the Bahamas; created his own space exploration organization, the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC); and launched a satellite into space dedicated to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the US’s first Black astronaut. The Day Tomorrow Began, Strachan’s first museum show in LA, comprises several immersive environments drawing on nature and culture, including a rice field inhabited by clay vessels, a group of figurative bronze sculptures, and selections from The Encyclopedia of Invisibility, his exploration of things unknown and unseen.
Robert Therrien: This is a Story
The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles | November 22–April 5, 2026
The late artist Robert Therrien is perhaps best known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects such as tables, chairs, and dishes that navigate between Pop Art and minimalism, with a dash of surrealist whimsy. This is the largest museum exhibition of his oeuvre to date, spanning five decades and featuring more than 120 works, from his signature sculptures to enigmatic drawings that draw on cartoon imagery and geometric abstraction in equal measure. Including many works that have never been shown in a museum before, This is a Story provides a comprehensive look at this quintessentially LA artist who constantly found wonder in the commonplace.
Text by Matt Stromberg | Photo credits on hyperallergic.com | Read More Here