Featured Events in Los Angeles in November, 2024(December Updated)

A Traveler’s Guide to Mettlach: Villeroy and Boch showcases everyday life in the 1800s Mettlach, Germany. Scenes of everyday life in Mettlach have been documented and celebrated by Villeroy and Boch, a ceramic production company founded in 1836 when Jean François Boch and Nicolas Villeroy merged their ceramic businesses into what is now known as Villeroy and Boch. The workers of the Mettlach factory came from diverse backgrounds, including art studios, archives, and museums. The varied backgrounds of the factory workers contributed to the artistic achievements of the Villeroy and Boch company. The Mettlach collection reflects German cultural experiences, societal interpretations, and mythology. This exhibition shows scenes of love and relationships as well as larger themes of fantasy, offering an all-encompassing snapshot of the myriad facets of human life within Mettlach. A Traveler’s Guide to Mettlach, on view in the Robert and Colette Wilson Gallery through June 2025, presents concepts of life, laughter, relationships, and the day-to-day existence of the German people.

Nancy Baker Cahill’s multifaceted augmented reality (AR) public art project, Mushroom Cloud, is a project focused on accountability; one that values sharing and conserving resources, and strengthening networked systems through participation, communication, and advocacy. The work speaks to rising waters, to viewers raising their gaze to witness the sky-covering mycelial network, and to collectively rising to the opportunity to combat the climate crisis through distributed support, mutual accountability, and environmental stewardship. Mushroom Cloud acknowledges the imminence of this cataclysmic crisis while offering hope that through cooperative and constructive action, a vibrant and vital future is still possible.

Climate Changeis a visceral, charged work of 21st-century expanded cinema. In this vision, which could be called dystopian but in truth is terrifyingly near, a catastrophic sea-level rise has inundated the world’s coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Kline opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view. Josh Kline: Climate Changeis organized by Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Lead support is provided by the MOCA Environmental Council, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, and Nora McNeely Hurley and Manitou Fund.

German artist Joseph Beuys is one of the most famous and controversial figures in the international art world in the second half of the 20th century. From teaching students to inspiring countless later artists, his influence on contemporary art is immeasurable. In this exhibition, from newspaper articles to bottled river water, Beuys's desire to change the world through art is condensed. His art is not captured through media such as painting or drawing. Instead, Beuys draws inspiration from the world around him, transforming seemingly simple, organic media into important works of art.

A Traveler’s Guide to Mettlach: Villeroy and Boch showcases everyday life in the 1800s Mettlach, Germany. Scenes of everyday life in Mettlach have been documented and celebrated by Villeroy and Boch, a ceramic production company founded in 1836 when Jean François Boch and Nicolas Villeroy merged their ceramic businesses into what is now known as Villeroy and Boch. The workers of the Mettlach factory came from diverse backgrounds, including art studios, archives, and museums. The varied backgrounds of the factory workers contributed to the artistic achievements of the Villeroy and Boch company. The Mettlach collection reflects German cultural experiences, societal interpretations, and mythology. This exhibition shows scenes of love and relationships as well as larger themes of fantasy, offering an all-encompassing snapshot of the myriad facets of human life within Mettlach. A Traveler’s Guide to Mettlach, on view in the Robert and Colette Wilson Gallery through June 2025, presents concepts of life, laughter, relationships, and the day-to-day existence of the German people.

Pinto Gallery is an LA-based contemporary art gallery, showcasing the most impressive and innovative Japanese artists.

Egypt’s 26th Dynasty (664–526 BCE) was a period of revival and renewal. It marks the last great phase of native pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt and is notable for its exceptional artworks, particularly stone sculpture. The achievements of Egyptian artists of this period are vividly expressed in the sculpted portraits of officials associated with the court and priesthood, which were created to be displayed in tombs and temples. The works in this exhibition are on special loan from the British Museum, London.

This February ‘DRIVE’ will open with The Parking Space, featuring a Chevrolet Caprice and Impala, a Ferrari 328 GTS and a Ligier microcar, parked in the gallery alongside a video in which Rhoades fervidly discourses on his concept of the Car Projects. While driving around Los Angeles in 1998, Rhoades explains the relationship of cars to his art (parking is equated with sitting in a sculpture) and to daily practice (driving between the house, the studio and stores is time and space for the mind to race and wander). He expounds on cars as icons of art history (Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia speeded modern art forward with their mechanized abstractions), identifiers of class (you are what you drive) and environments of control. The radio is tuned to Power 106 FM and as the world streams by to the propulsive hip-hop beat, the romance of cars seems irresistible. In April, the installation will be reconfigured to accommodate a lounge and become The Pit. An influx of archival materials will be key to unpacking the various episodes of Rhoades’ Car Projects, starting with the Caprice and the 1996 exhibition ‘Traffic.’ Not only did the artist cut a deal with CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France the organizers of the show, to go in on buying him the car as a transactional work of art, he later leveraged its symbolic value by trading the Caprice for a Ferrari. This summer the exhibition’s focus will swerve onto The Racetrack. A set of half-scale NASCAR-style cars, custom jackets and colorfully painted tire barriers are among what remains of ‘The Snowball.’ Staged in California as a daylong racing event at Willow Springs speedway, ‘The Snowball’ was ultimately destined for the 2000 Venice Biennale and Rhoades’ collaborative work for the Danish Pavilion. In September, The Garage will cover the final stretch of ‘DRIVE’ with a selection of framed works on paper and a major sculptural installation. Throughout the year, the line-up for ‘DRIVE’ will feature a range of public programs. A film series centered on cars and the city of Los Angeles will be curated by film historian and critic Elvis Mitchell. A theatrical staging of the playwright Charles Mee’s ‘Under Construction,’ which was inspired by Rhoades’ art in its collage depiction of America today, will be presented as part of Hauser & Wirth’s Performance Project. Organized as an investigation in real time, ‘DRIVE’ invites people to approach the exhibition like a garage of art and ideas, in which cars are coming and going and tinkering is a productive state of mind. As an artist, Rhoades was keenly attuned to sources of cultural power and weakness. When he put the internal combustion engine on art’s pedestal, was he presciently placing the car where it belongs for a greener tomorrow? The car as a subject in Rhoades’ art continues to drive and trouble the imagination today.

KYDOIMOS: The Din of Battle is comprised of more than 50,000 aerial photographs of Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military installation set in a remote portion of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. The flickering images in KYDOIMOS depict test grids inscribed into the desert floor, where chemical and biological weapons and their facsimiles are detonated, turning this isolated landscape into a measuring device against which dispersal rates, toxicity levels, and threats to the human body are measured. Gaining access to the site required patience, persistence, and a government handler who accompanied the artist at all times. Maisel was further challenged by posted signs declaring that “Photography, or making notes, drawings, maps, or graphic representations of this area, or its activities, is prohibited unless specifically authorized by the Commander.” These limitations notwithstanding, Maisel was able to capture an abundance of images that collectively convey the scope and scale of the secretive activities at Dugway Proving Ground, while also acknowledging the ways in which they are abstracted and concealed.

The Western landscape is a place where the transformation of physical space involves both visualization and manipulation, where the connections between what can be physically seen and how it is visually represented are not always clear; technologies originally designed to render places visible often became instruments of invisibility and surveillance, severing western lands from the populations that depend on them. Out of Site focuses on three technological revolutions to examine how visual technologies, artistic interventions, and the workings of state power have evolved in tandem with the Western landscape: wet-plate photography, used to theorize geological processes; the rise of aerial photography and pattern recognition; and the increasing use of drones, satellites, and other long-range photographic technologies to image secretive sites, military installations, and other technologically-mediated locales. The exhibition features 90 artworks, archival materials, and devices ranging from mammoth plate cameras to drones. Carleton Watkins’ Nevada mining photographs,19th-century geological reports, and stereoviews, and Margaret Bourke-White’s aerial surveys published in LIFE magazine in 1936 are juxtaposed with contemporary photographic and video pieces by David Maisel, Michael Light, and Steven Yazzie, among other artists.

This site-specific work explores the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem, as well as the destruction of the forest and its potential for regeneration. The sculpture celebrates the beauty of wood in its natural state and emphasizes its potential as a reusable and renewable resource. California-based Japanese American artist Mineo Mizuno’s site-specific sculpture, titled Homage to Nature, is crafted from fallen timber gathered in the forests of the Sierra Nevada, where the artist lives and works. Views of the San Gabriel Mountains in the background will frame the work. The sculpture explores the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem, as well as the destruction of the forest and its potential for regeneration. Homage to Nature celebrates the beauty of wood in its natural state and emphasizes its potential as a reusable and renewable resource. Using yakisugi (shou sugi), a traditional Japanese method of wood preservation known in the West as burnt timber cladding, the charred surfaces of the reclaimed timber in the sculpture speak not only to fire’s destructive power but also to its ability to reinvigorate the land. As a companion and response to the sculpture, a “fire landscape” will be planted near the sculpture to mimic new growth that occurs naturally after a fire. This new sculpture marks the culmination of a series of installations by the artist designed to reflect on The Huntington’s collections and link the gardens and art galleries. Homage to Nature will be unveiled on May 25, 2024, and will remain on view for five years.

Simone Leigh, a traveling exhibition organized by the ICA Boston and co-presented in Los Angeles by LACMA and the California African American Museum, is the first comprehensive survey of the richly layered work of this celebrated artist. LACMA’s presentation features approximately 20 years of Leigh’s production in ceramic, bronze, video, and installation, as well as works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation. Over the past two decades, Leigh has created works exploring questions of Black femme subjectivity and knowledge production. Addressing a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and traditions, her art references vernacular and hand-made processes from across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and architecture. Accompanied by a major monograph, this exhibition offers visitors a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of Leigh’s complex and profoundly moving work.

Josh Kline’s Climate Change is both an exhibition and a complete work of art—an ambitious, immersive sci-fi installation that imagines a future shaped by the devastating climate crisis and the ordinary people doomed to inhabit it. Kline’s eponymous project, begun in 2018 and produced in parts over the past five years, will be brought together for the first time in this exhibition, mobilizing sculpture, moving image work, photography, and ephemeral materials to radically transform MOCA Grand Avenue’s galleries. Climate Change is a visceral, vibrant work of extended cinema in the 21st century. In this vision, which could be called dystopia but is actually pretty close, catastrophic sea level rise has already inundated the world's coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions of traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the system built to sustain and expand capitalist enterprise and global hegemony disintegrates its own foundations? Klein opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the afterthought.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard is the first museum exhibition of L.A.-based and Venezuelan-born artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (b. 1929). Trained in painting, print-making, and sculpture in Venezuela, Chile, and New York, Suarez Frimkess’s most recognized works are made in clay. Spanning over five decades, The Finest Disregard features ceramics, paintings, and drawings, including an important selection of works made collaboratively with her husband, Michael Frimkess. Although her work is usually considered to stand outside the California ceramic tradition, this exhibition demonstrates otherwise. With many works shown in public for the first time, The Finest Disregard offers insights into the artist's fascination with art history books, popular media, cartoons, animation, autobiography, and the humor found in the folds between the layers of everyday life.

‘And Then Came the Environment’ presents a range of Gustav Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed ‘Damaged Nature.’

New York-based artist Firelei Báez has achieved wide acclaim over the past decade for her rigorous paintings, drawings and immersive installations that explore the influences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Conjuring forgotten narratives, Báez carefully fills history’s lacunae with joyful rebellion. In her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth since joining the gallery in 2023, Báez presents new large-scale canvases, drawings and her first-ever bronze sculpture at the gallery’s Downtown Arts District center in Los Angeles. Complex and layered, Báez’s work depicts fantastical hybrid figures and reimagined worlds. Employing beauty to reprocess the enduring effects of violence and trauma, Báez challenges traditional representations of history, nationality, gender and race. United by common cause, the paintings incorporate a wide range of subjects including art history, science fiction, anthropology, pop culture, folklore and fantasy. ‘The fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it’ is a reference to the work of Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, a key figure in shaping theories informing the Caribbean’s influence on the global stage. Drawing inspiration from Glissant’s text, ‘Poetics of Relation’ (1990)—from which the title directly quotes—Báez navigates the tensions between identity and place, using Glissant’s concept of opacity to explore modes of resistance, namely the ability to navigate the world freely within a refusal of being fully understood—both to others and to oneself. Báez considers mythology an important tool, ‘a way of correcting the past and projecting a different future.’ Growing up in the Dominican Republic, the artist heard local folk stories about a mythic femme trickster called a ‘ciguapa’ who was known for her elusiveness. While such lore was shared to discourage unruly and wild behavior, Báez has embraced the ciguapa in her work as a figure of endless possibility. Ever-morphing and multiplying, her composite creatures are often depicted with human legs, a coat of delicate fur and backwards facing feet so that she remains traceless and ultimately unknowable. In the ciguapa, Báez explores the body as a living archive, a shape-shifting repository of meaning and history, whose continuous transformation is inherently defiant.

‘And Then Came the Environment’ presents a range of Gustav Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed ‘Damaged Nature.’

In conjunction with Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Roberts Projects presents Betye Saar’s monumental altar assemblage, Mojotech. Created in 1987 during the artist’s residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this installation-based work is a testament to the fusion of contemporary technology and the mystique of ancient spirituality.

In September 2024, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In line with Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, the installation playfully engages with material and immaterial qualities of the museum’s architecture. A series of large-scale optical devices designed specifically for MOCA Geffen will respond to the building itself, as well as to the everchanging atmosphere of Los Angeles. Visitors will encounter a dazzling range of sensory experiences that harness the laws of geometric optics to address feelings and concepts of embodiment, perception, and participation.

In September 2024, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In line with Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, the installation playfully engages with material and immaterial qualities of the museum’s architecture. A series of large-scale optical devices designed specifically for MOCA Geffen will respond to the building itself, as well as to the everchanging atmosphere of Los Angeles. Visitors will encounter a dazzling range of sensory experiences that harness the laws of geometric optics to address feelings and concepts of embodiment, perception, and participation.

Southern California’s iconic art event, PST ART, returns in September 2024 with over 800 artists, 70 exhibits, and 1 amazing theme:Art Meets Science. This “collision” will explore the intersection of art and science, past and present, with organizations presenting exhibits on topics such as ancient cosmology, Indigenous science fiction, environmental justice, and artificial intelligence.

In September 2024, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In line with Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, the installation playfully engages with material and immaterial qualities of the museum’s architecture. A series of large-scale optical devices designed specifically for MOCA Geffen will respond to the building itself, as well as to the everchanging atmosphere of Los Angeles. Visitors will encounter a dazzling range of sensory experiences that harness the laws of geometric optics to address feelings and concepts of embodiment, perception, and participation.

For several decades, artist Cai Guo-Qiang has used gunpowder and pyrotechnics to create drawings, paintings, and explosion events. The exhibitionCai Guo-Qiang:A Material Odysseywill fill the first floor galleries at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Based on years of research by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute,A Material Odysseywill explore the nature and properties of gunpowder and chronicle its use by the artist. This explosive material, invented in China over 1,100 years ago, has come to define Cai’s work. Its unpredictable nature dictates his artistic process and determines the outcome. Through gunpowder, the artist invites uncontrollable forces to participate in the creation of his work. With an abundance of artworks and scientific displays, the exhibition will narrate the lifelong love story of Cai Guo-Qiang with gunpowder. Programs accompanyingA Material Odysseywill include videos illustrating the making of fireworks, the process of creating gunpowder paintings, interactive displays, and a variety of film screenings and conversations.

L.A. Louver presents the debut American exhibition of a new body of work by Los Angeles-based architect and artist Thom Mayne. Investigating the philosophical intersections of impermanence and materiality, Mayne demonstrates how technology – at the frontiers of computer language and object-creation – can reframe and readdress timeless questions at the essence of artmaking.

L.A. Louver presents the debut American exhibition of a new body of work by Los Angeles-based architect and artist Thom Mayne. Investigating the philosophical intersections of impermanence and materiality, Mayne demonstrates how technology – at the frontiers of computer language and object-creation – can reframe and readdress timeless questions at the essence of artmaking.

Caldwell founded the KAOS network in 1984, and the exhibition traverses time, geography, history, and memory through Caldwell’s diverse practices of photography, film, video, music, performance, community design, and interactive media.

Christina Ramberg (American, 1946–1995) is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies. In her work, she develops a visual vocabulary of fetish objects from hands, torsos, shoes, and locks of hair. Over time these images become increasingly abstract, eventually reduced to a set of simple geometries. The first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Ramberg in almost 30 years, the exhibition presents approximately 100 works including paintings, quilts, and archival ephemera.

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures, created in collaboration with scientists at the Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory, presents a group of rare and visually stunning artworks from different cultures and time periods to explore the variety of human attempts to explain the universe’s origins, mechanics, and meaning. Nearly every ancient culture has seen the heavens as a mirror of cosmic structure and process, and ancient measurements of time were directly influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies.Mapping the Infinitereveals how, as religions evolved, cultures conceived of and depicted cosmic deities and concepts of time and space through works of art and sacred architecture. The exhibition illuminates this history of cosmologiesaround the globe from the Stone Age to the present, from Neolithic Europe to the present day and including Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia,the Islamic Middle East, the Indigenous Americas, Northern Europe, and the United States.