15 Art Shows to See in Los Angeles This Summer
A romp through early punk culture, Odilon Redon’s dreamy portraiture, Willie Birch’s papier-mâché odes to New Orleans, Samella Lewis’s visions in woodcut, and more.
This summer, the Los Angeles art scene is doing what it does best: challenging, complicating, and questioning the status quo. Oxy Arts will convert into a workshop for radical thought on race and resilience; Joan art center’s exhibition on Ulises Carrión highlights how the Mexican-born artist expanded the book into its own art form. Meanwhile, influential publisher Semiotext(e) fuses theory and vernacular culture in a showcase at the ICA LA. A show of punk ephemera and memorabilia at the Skirball recaptures some of the nascent movement’s raucous energy, and at the Huntington, an exhibition coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence asks how the promises of that founding document have been fulfilled or forsaken.
National Museum of the Aftermath
Oxy Arts, 4757 York Boulevard, Highland Park, Los Angeles
June 8–August 8
This summer, Oxy Arts will be transformed into the National Museum of the Aftermath. It’s the latest iteration of artist Jon Rubin’s peripatetic National Museum, which examines historical narratives and erasures, changing its title and specific inquiries in each location. Curated by Rubin and Harrison Kinnane Smith and conceived by artist Cauleen Smith, this version will focus on America’s racial reckoning and the possibility of collective resistance given the weight of our past. Smith will film scenes of speculative acts of solidarity in the gallery, which will also host public talks, a film series, a reading group, and other events.
Ulises Carrión, a bookwork in many places
JOAN, 1206 Maple Avenue, Suite 715, Downtown, Los Angeles
Through August 9
Ulises Carrión was a pioneer in the emergence of printed matter as an art form in its own right. In 1972, he moved to Amsterdam, where he and Aart van Barneveld founded the gallery and bookstore Other Books and So, which became an important node for an international community of experimental publishing made possible by economical production and distribution. a bookwork in many places focuses on the creative networks he fostered, especially in Southern California, showcasing his own works and those made in collaboration or kinship with artists including Sylvia Salazar Simpson, Suzanne Lacy, and Ed Ruscha, alongside contemporary examples of Carrión’s enduring legacy.
Scott Carrillo Azevedo, The American Home—The Broken Promise
Long Beach Museum of Art Downtown, 356 East 3rd Street, Long Beach, California
Through August 9
Scott Carrillo Azevedo’s captivating canvases depict the American home as a site torn between community and belonging, displacement and rupture. Incorporating images of domestic interiors from vintage magazines alongside portraits of family members, he delves into painful histories of racism and economic precarity, such as redlining, as well as personal losses and trauma. Beneath his deft brushwork and vivid palette lay complex, fraught narratives about American identity and its fractures.
