The art community in Los Angeles is digging deep into history this November, excavating and reframing it through novel juxtapositions and archival findings. Isabelle Frances McGuire tackles the Salem Witch Trials with a video game that bears uneasy relevance to our current age of creeping authoritarianism (just in time for next week’s midterms). Milano Chow draws on the archives of the LA Public Library to create ghostly architectural facades that seem at once familiar and foreign. At LACMA, an exhibition gives proper due to the city’s pioneering Brockman Gallery of 1967–90, which gave early support to scores of Black artists. And at the Brick, a retrospective brings together the two sides of Todd Gray’s long career: his commercial photos of musical acts and his post-modern tableaux, which themselves pull from archival images to construct new narratives.
Isabelle Frances McGuire: Joy is a Puppet
Bel Ami, 709 North Hill Street, Suite #105 and #103, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Through November 28
Isabelle Frances McGuire plays with history, dusting off well-known figures and disrupting their iconic status to enhance their humanity. In Joy is a Puppet, she takes aim at the Salem Witch Trials, a dark period that has taken on increasing relevance as we slide deeper into fascism. The exhibition features a bronze statue, a trio of frogs, an assemblage of baskets, and an interactive video game in which the player takes on the role of a woman accused of witchcraft and must figure out their next move.
April Bey: All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them...They’re Worthless
Vielmetter Los Angeles, 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, #101, Downtown, Los Angeles
October 31–December 19
Bahamian-American artist April Bey explores love, romance, and companionship in new fabric works on view at Vielmetter. These pieces represent the latest chapter in Bey’s Atlantica project, in which the artist assumes the identity of an extraterrestrial being and shares dispatches about human life with her home planet. Incorporating crushed velvet, metallic brocade, and sherpa fabric, the large-scale woven tapestries feature portraits that Bey took during a 2024 residency in the historically Black community of Orange Mound in Memphis, Tennessee, depicting scenes of queer intimacy within her opulent textile world.
Charles Arnoldi: String Theory
Michael Kohn Gallery, 1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through December 19
Charles Arnoldi has been expanding the terrain of abstraction for almost six decades, from his early twig-and-stick constructions to his chainsaw-carved plywood works and hard-edge geometric paintings. String Theory presents paintings made between 2016 and 2019 in which networks of lyrical lines dance across the surface, their fluid energy contained by the rectilinear boundaries of the canvas. Balancing a sense of visual delight with formal complexity, these paintings are in dialogue with works by Brice Marden, Alexander Calder, and others, while branching out into compelling new directions.
iris yirei hu: Unconscious Relics
Official Welcome, 672 South La Fayette Park Place, Suite 46, Westlake, Los Angeles
Through December 19
Iris yirei hu draws on dreams, ancestral knowledge, collective ritual, and elements of the natural world to ground contemporary issues within traditional frameworks. Unconscious Relics features new paintings, ceramics, and reliquary boxes adorned with images and objects that hold personal and cultural significance, originating from Tongva customs and Chinese herbal medicine. Juxtaposing these disparate symbols, hu layers various belief systems in order to create new mythologies for our current, troubled times.
Milano Chow: Fantasy Street and Deborah Turbeville: The Lifted Veil
Hollyhock House, 4800 Hollywood Boulevard, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles
Through December 20
Milano Chow creates stark, haunting architectural facades and interiors using graphite, ink, and photo transfer. For the works in Fantasy Street, she ventured into the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library, pulling images of early-20th-century movie theaters, shops, and apartments to construct fictional buildings through ink, pencil, and photo transfer. The works are displayed in an unfurnished room in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and mounted on folding screens designed by Chow, putting them in conversation with the historic home and blending fiction and reality. Alongside this exhibition, Chow curated The Lifted Veil, featuring surreal, dreamlike photographs by Deborah Turbeville from the 1970s through the 1990s that resonate with her own entrancing alienation.
Yuntao Xu: Estranged Landscape
Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station, 1020 East Palmer Avenue, Glendale, California
Through January 8, 2027
Los Angeles is full of art spaces in unconventional sites — strip malls, storefronts, apartments — and the Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station in Glendale fits right in with that tradition. Within this modest, window-lined box, architect and artist Yuntao Xu has created an installation inspired by the natural landscape surrounding the gas station that houses it. Composed of reflective fabric hung from the ceiling, fluffy textiles, and colored lights, Estranged Landscape echoes the forms of Southern California’s dramatic peaks and valleys with a campy, space-age spin.
Todd Gray: Church and State
The Brick, 518 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through January 16, 2027
Todd Gray’s photographic assemblages mix images of art, architecture, and the natural world in ambitious tableaux that lay bare the intertwining threads of colonialism and culture. Gray got his start as a commercial photographer, however, when he was just a teenager, photographing bands including the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin; shooting album covers for Gladys Knight and Bobby Brown; and even becoming Michael Jackson’s personal photographer. Church and State brings together these two bodies of work for the first time, alongside biographical ephemera illustrating Gray’s personal experience as a Black man coming of age in Los Angeles during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
Julie Tolentino: And Never Ends
Fulcrum Arts, 544 North Fair Oaks Avenue, Pasadena, California
Through January 23, 2027
Julie Tolentino’s wide-ranging practice incorporates performance, sound, installation, scent, and text. Fittingly, her current exhibition at Fulcrum Arts aims to “decenter the visual,” encouraging visitors to utilize their other senses, especially hearing. Eschewing a static presentation, this new installation includes cultured crystals, an auditory composition, and a performance-based drawing, creating an environment that will continue to change and develop throughout the exhibition’s run.
The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Through January 24, 2027
The Brockman Gallery was LA’s first major art gallery founded and run by and for Black artists, exhibiting the work of David Hammons, Ulysses Jenkins, Suzanne Jackson, Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar, and others early in their careers. Founded in 1967 by brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis shortly after the Watts Rebellion, the gallery served as a vital cultural and community hub in Leimert Park until its closing in 1990. This is the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to the gallery, tracing its history and legacy through over 60 artworks and archival material.
Reggie Burrows Hodges: A Theater of Dreams, A Theater of Miracles, A Theater of Passions
Art + Practice, 3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles
California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles
Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles
Through February 28, 2027
This three-venue exhibition showcases the work of Los Angeles-born artist Reggie Burrows Hodges, with expressionistic paintings that highlight his deep engagement with art history intertwined with autobiographical narratives and scenes of contemporary Black life. A Theater of Miracles showcases the influence of Old Master paintings in his work, including several at the Getty, such as Jacopo Bassano’s “The Miracle of the Quails” (1554), which will be on display at CAAM. Meanwhile, A Theater of Passions exhibits new paintings inspired by the work of father-and-daughter painters Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi in the Getty’s collection. Finally, A Theater of Dreams at Art + Practice reflects on the artist’s childhood growing up in Compton and his travels through Europe, where he encountered many of these Old Master paintings in person.