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

Iron Crew 2024 - The World’s First Action Scene Competition! Experience 10 jaw-dropping action scenes and short films competing for the title of King of Iron Crew! Judged by an A-list panel of directors, stunt coordinators, producers, and action stars. Celebrity appearances, a surprise live exhibition, and a special performance by A.T.O. Worldwide! Plus, food, music, and an epic community vibe. This isn’t just a party—it’s where film festival meets action-packed showdowns. Tickets are extremely limited, so hustle and grab yours now! Look for the Golden doors Red Carpet Starts at 3pm Uber and Lyft Stongly Recomended. www.ironcrewbattle.com Information Source: eventbrite

Dazzling New Year's Eve Flamenco Dinner Show Experince at Cafe Sevilla! DESCRIPTION: Ring in 2025 with a festive 3-course Spanish dinner combined with a 2-part Flamenco Dance performance. Our dancers are at the top of their field, having been trained in Spain and teaching their own Flamenco classes. These shows are a sensory indulgence of sight, sound, and taste, leaving our guests with a piece of truly Spanish culture. Marvel at the passion, beauty, and athleticism of this traditional art form as you enjoy an included dinner featuring our Shaved Jamón Serrano Ensalada Sevillana followed by our award-winning Paella Valenciana topped with a cold water lobster tail and Lemon Tart with Linguee Cherries for dessert. A tapas menu, full bar, eclectic wine list, and other menu upgrades are also available for à la carte purchase. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free dinner menu upgrades available on request. TICKET PRICE: $119 per person (price does not include non-mandatory gratuity or mandatory tax, which will be added to check at the end of the show). Ticket include 3-course dinner and show. Please note, we cannot permit children under 10 to attend the show. SEATING TIMES: Doors open at 6:30 PM and seating is pre-assigned. Dinner show starts promptly at 7 PM. CANCELLATION POLICY: Up until December 20, 2024, if a cancellation is necessary, we will provide a refund in the form of a gift card. If purchased through EventBrite, this amount will be less EventBrite fees. Please contact us via corporate@cafesevilla.com for cancellations. December 21, 2024, and after, no refunds will be provided. PLEASE NOTE: There is a private event directly after this showtime so we kindly ask that our guests leave the theater space no later than 8:45 PM. Information Source: Cafe Sevilla | eventbrite

Experience an unforgettable New Year's Eve at Gothicumbia NYE in Los Angeles. Taking place at The Regent Theater, located at 448 S. Main St., Los Angeles, CA, 90013, this event on December 31, 2024, promises a night of dark and intriguing entertainment. Immerse yourself in the unique atmosphere of Gothicumbia NYE and ring in the new year in style. Get ready for a night filled with music, dancing, and a touch of mystery at this exclusive event.

Join the annual celebration of NOON YEAR’S EVE in Los Angeles at 29 Hubble Irvine. The event will take place on December 31, 2024, from noon onwards. The festivities include a confetti countdown, photo opportunities, and a glow dance party. Due to limited space, it is recommended to book tickets online to secure a spot and not miss out on the festive fun. Don't wait too long, book your tickets today!

Chatterbox Comedy PresentsNEW YEAR'S STEVE: A NYE Extravaganza with Steve Hernandez!featuring...Lisa ChanouxScott LuhrsRicky MaciasIncludes champagne toast! Cocktail attire encouraged. $20 advanced tickets/$30 at the door Information Source: Chatterbox Comedy Night | eventbrite

Experience an unforgettable night at Forever Midnight LA in the vibrant city of Los Angeles. This highly anticipated event will take place at the prestigious Los Angeles Convention Center, located at 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90015. Join fellow attendees on December 31, 2024, for an evening filled with excitement and entertainment. Get ready to ring in the new year in style at Forever Midnight LA.

1301PE is pleased to present its sixth solo exhibition with internationally revered Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija entitled “NO MORE REALITY (FOR PP)”. In August 2020, Tiravanija collected American newspapers that are still published daily. This is the starting point for “NO MORE REALITY” which references Philippe Parreno’s seminal 1991-93 series of work. Focusing on this phrase in large painted text which forms an expansive floor to ceiling installation, while upstairs Tiravanija refines it to a single text per the front and back page of the newspaper. The phrase continually renews itself through Tiravanija’s work and finds new relevancy each time it is exhibited–it purposefully welcomes its reinterpretation and renewal. The phrase “NO MORE REALITY,” which invites a certain interpretation, pushes back on the viewer’s preconceived notions commenting not on the news itself but of the interpretation of the news. The varied newspapers come from different towns with different ideas, politics and beliefs which in turn is reflected by what is valued and displayed by the local news. “Everywhere, we feel the shift of power under our feet; how can we not address it, even with our tongues in our cheeks!” -Rirkrit Tiravanija For more than thirty years, Tiravanija’s work has had resounding effects on the entire field of contemporary art. Participation, both active and passive, has been a primary element of his artistic practice, which in a way that is unique to Tiravanija dissolves the onlooker and object dichotomy.

This sprawling exhibit explores the profound impact and influence that hip-hop music and culture has had on the United States and the world since it burst forth in the Bronx 50 years ago. The Mixtape Exhibit delves deep into the sounds, scenes and history of hip-hop music, dance, graffiti, fashion, business, and activism. On view are rarely displayed artifacts from Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., MC Lyte, Lil Wayne, Slick Rick, Egyptian Lover, Eminem, and many others, and visitors can make their own hip-hop music with five unique interactives. The exhibit was curated by a team of four co-curators who bring a deep knowledge of hip-hop, academic rigor and creativity to the project: Felicia Angeja Viator, associate professor of history, San Francisco State University, author of To Live And Defy In LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America, and one of the first women DJs in the Bay Area hip-hop scene; Adam Bradley, professor of English and founding director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture (the RAP Lab) at UCLA, and co-editor of The Anthology of Rap; Jason King, dean, USC Thornton School of Music and former chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU; and Dan Charnas, associate arts professor, NYU Clive Davis Institute of Music, and author of Dilla Time: The Life And Afterlife Of The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm. The co-curators worked in conjunction with GRAMMY Museum Chief Curator and VP of Curatorial Affairs Jasen Emmons as well as a 20-member Advisory Board.

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.

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.

This immersive exhibition tells the story of a unique mid-20th-century collaboration between artists and engineers. It explores the beginnings of the organization Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., as well as two of its most pivotal projects: 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and the iconic Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan, both of which pursued groundbreaking integrations of theater, dance, technology, and interactive, multimedia art.

This immersive exhibition tells the story of a unique mid-20th-century collaboration between artists and engineers. It explores the beginnings of the organization Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., as well as two of its most pivotal projects: 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and the iconic Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan, both of which pursued groundbreaking integrations of theater, dance, technology, and interactive, multimedia art.

‘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.

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.

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.

Electric light emerged as an artistic medium in the mid-20th century, as artists engaged with new technology, mass media and industrial materials. The exhibition Plugged In: Art and Electric Light illuminates these themes through 11 works produced between 1964 and 1970, all drawn from the Museum’s collections. This focused group includes Andy Warhol’s controversial White Painting (1964), its nude female torso subversively activated by ultraviolet light; Dan Flavin’s stark fluorescent installations made from commercial materials; and Allen Ruppersberg’s Location Piece (1968), an “environmental sculpture” that envelops the viewer in unnerving ambient light.

Electric light emerged as an artistic medium in the mid-20th century, as artists engaged with new technology, mass media and industrial materials. The exhibition Plugged In: Art and Electric Light illuminates these themes through 11 works produced between 1964 and 1970, all drawn from the Museum’s collections. This focused group includes Andy Warhol’s controversial White Painting (1964), its nude female torso subversively activated by ultraviolet light; Dan Flavin’s stark fluorescent installations made from commercial materials; and Allen Ruppersberg’s Location Piece (1968), an “environmental sculpture” that envelops the viewer in unnerving ambient light.

Electric light emerged as an artistic medium in the mid-20th century, as artists engaged with new technology, mass media and industrial materials. The exhibition Plugged In: Art and Electric Light illuminates these themes through 11 works produced between 1964 and 1970, all drawn from the Museum’s collections. This focused group includes Andy Warhol’s controversial White Painting (1964), its nude female torso subversively activated by ultraviolet light; Dan Flavin’s stark fluorescent installations made from commercial materials; and Allen Ruppersberg’s Location Piece (1968), an “environmental sculpture” that envelops the viewer in unnerving ambient light.

Examine Getty’s much-loved painting, Irises by Vincent van Gogh, from the perspective of modern conservation science. This exhibition shows how the artist’s understanding of light and color informed his painting practice, and how conservators and scientists working together can harness the power of light with analytical tools that uncover the artist’s materials and working methods. Lastly, this exhibition reveals how light has irrevocably changed some of the colors in Irises. A painting we thought we knew so well has suddenly become quite unfamiliar.