This month’s list includes extensive surveys of established artists and great solo shows from the next generation, marking the return of the art world after the relaxed dog days of summer. Chicana artist Linda Vallejo’s retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen covers five decades of her work, while Webber Gallery hosts a restorative exhibition of now underrated photographer and lesbian activist Tee A. Corinne. Other accomplished artists include filmmaker Arthur Jafa, whose exhibition of new work at Sprüth Magers is, surprisingly, his first solo exhibition in LA, and environmental artist Lita Albuquerque, metaphorically tearing up the floor of the Michael Kohn Gallery. Emerging artists including Lotus L. Kang, Aria Dean, Samantha Yun Wall and Rachael Bos in attendance promising solo shows – proof that the children are indeed doing well.
Linda Vallejo: Selected Works, 1969–2024
Parrasch Heijnen1326 South Boyle Avenue, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
Until October 12
For more than five decades, Linda Vallejo has explored Chicanx identity and heritage, nature and spirituality, and tradition and technology through diverse bodies of work spanning printmaking, sculpture, painting, and installation. Her career-spanning research collects early constructions made from surviving materials and inspired by Mesoamerican architecture; her Tree people series (1980–1990) of assemblages made from tree pieces found in Los Angeles; And Make them all Mexicanin which she colored white porcelain sculptures and photographs of mainstream pop culture icons in various shades of rich brown. Her most recent series, Self-knowledge in the new age (2023–present), features pixelated portraits and abstractions that explore the relationship between the human and the digital.
Rachael Bos: Dead Loop
Gallery De Boer3311 East Pico Boulevard, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
Until October 12
Rachael Bos’s detailed oil paintings of Olympic athletes are characterized by a dry, obsessive focus on surface, form, texture and pose, rather than on the pageantry of the games. In ‘Feedbacker No. 2’ (2024), anonymous gymnasts in gray tights create a swirling star shape with their curved bodies. Even when the Chicago-based painter chooses familiar subjects, as with a canvas named after Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci, it is not the athletic skill that is emphasized. Bos instead cuts to just above the competitor’s nose, drawing our attention to the clash between her brown shoes and bright red tracksuit, and the way she nervously wrings her hands.
Lita Albuquerque: Earth skin
Michael Kohn Gallery1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
September 12 – October 19
Lita Albuquerque’s practice has long included engagement with locations beyond the gallery space, dating back to ‘Malibu Line’ (1978), a bright blue path that connected land, sea and sky, and her first earthwork using ephemeral pigments ( that she used). remade earlier this year). Earth skin inverts this relationship by bringing the landscape into the gallery, with a floor of decayed granite suggesting a break in the barrier between nature and culture. The installation will be accompanied by new gestural paintings that link body movement to symbolic marks.
Tahnee Lonsdale: A billion little moons
Night gallery2276 East 16th Street, Downtown Los Angeles
September 14 – October 19
The enigmatic figures on Tahnee Lonsdale’s dreamy canvases float between bodily dissolution and appearance, emerging from layers of oil paint before fading back into them. Her stylized feminine forms are reminiscent of modernist predecessors such as Paul Klee, but at the same time offer a contemporary view on existential questions from the 20th century. The thirteen richly colored paintings in this exhibition depict groups of women, arranged in superficial, frieze-like compositions that resonate on both a formal and mystical level.
Aria Dean: Facts worth knowing
Chateau Shatto540 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
September 14 – October 26
Aria Dean investigates how we assign meaning to art objects, and how those objects do that in turn reflect and refract meaning back to us. Of Facts worth knowingher second solo exhibition at Château Shatto, Dean focuses on the vast Babylonian sets of Intolerance (1916), DW Griffith’s sprawling historical epic, made partly in response to criticism of his now infamous film Birth of a nation (1915). The set was abandoned on a lot in East Hollywood shortly after filming and has been quoted and imitated by a range of sources, from a The facade of the Hollywood Mall and Disney’s Hollywood Land theme park in Anaheim based on the writings of Kenneth Anger and the LA Noir video game. Dean’s digitally crafted sculptures engage with this web of references, occupying the liminal space between illusion and reality, authentic and ersatz.
Samantha Yun Wall: Nothing to be afraid of
Timothy Hawkinson Gallery7424 Beverly Boulevard, Fairfax, Los Angeles
September 21 – October 26
Samantha Yun Wall borrows from East Asian and Western myths and folk tales to shape the subject matter of her haunting ink drawings. As a Black Korean immigrant, she also draws from her specific experiences navigating identity, belonging, and otherness. Using a palette of dense black, bright white and moody gray, she depicts the outsiders, monsters and witches – often women – of these cross-cultural parables, reimagining them as protagonists of the rejected, oppressed and silenced.
Lotus L. Kang: Azaleas
Commonwealth and Council3006 West 7th Street, Suite 220, Koreatown, Los Angeles
September 21 – October 26
Lotus L. Kang does not necessarily create objects to look at, but rather poetic environments to navigate physically and psychologically. The juxtaposition of industrial and organic materials such as steel pipes, film strips, silicone, tatami mats, kelp and anchovies, Kang evokes a nexus of autobiographical and cultural references, balanced between post-minimalist aesthetics and biological entropy. She often uses ephemeral elements such as unfixed photo paper and kimchi ingredients that suggest a state of existence that is constantly in flux.
Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us
Webber Gallery939 South Santa Fe Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles
September 14 – November 30
The late Tee A. Corinne was an influential lesbian activist, photographer and educator who depicted queer love, eroticism and camaraderie with candor and freedom at a time when this was far from universally accepted. She shared her knowledge and enthusiasm by holding weeklong photography workshops called “Feminist Photography Ovulars” from 1979 to 1983 at the Rootworks, a lesbian commune in Southern Oregon. A forest fire between us offers an overview of her groundbreaking work, including graceful nudes, candid scenes from the queer community, and radical images of female utopia.
Arthur Jafa: native
Sprüth Magers5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles
September 14 – December 14
Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa uses the archive as his medium, remixing, cutting, pasting and reassembling a wide spectrum of still and moving images into biting commentary on what it means to be black in America. The centerpiece of his first solo gallery exhibition in LA is BEN GAZARRA (2024), a revisionist version of the climactic scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi driver (1976). Jafa’s darkly comic intervention is more incendiary and racially charged than the original film.
Tom Van Sant: an earthly twin in the digital dawn
18th Street Art Center1639 18th Street, Santa Monica, California
September 7 – February 1, 2025
Before Google Earth, there was GeoSphere. In 1988, Tom Van Sant began working on a groundbreaking digital model of our planet, the GeoSphere Project. He worked with scientist Dr. L. Van Warren and combined thousands of satellite images to create an accurate representation of Earth as seen from space. The project grew to include other elements, such as the Earth Situation Room, which mapped ecosystems and provided data on climate change. An earthly twin in the digital dawn highlights how Van Sant’s work offered artists, scientists, and planners a vision of a geographically and ecologically connected Earth, years before the global adoption of the Internet.
