I’ve been told that the reason many Los Angeles-based galleries—which, in the late 1990s, had largely been clustered in Chinatown—started to move westward was that more and more of their clientele were based in China. These collectors were less than enthusiastic about trekking so far north and east from the airport upon arrival. Dealers decided to meet them halfway, mostly in Culver City, a separate municipality that was then working towards the cultural and economic “revitalization” of its plentiful industrial spaces; The New York Times dubbed the town a “nascent Chelsea.”
Culver City is long since revitalized, and many of its galleries—most notably, Blum—are no more. Today, several of LA’s larger spaces have settled in the tonier mid-Wilshire, Beverly Hills, and West Hollywood neighborhoods, but the majority have chosen the rougher-edged commercial corridors of Hollywood proper, along Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. Last month’s piece on fall openings in LA mostly focused on shows in these regions; the action felt dense and synchronous, maybe indeed a bit like Chelsea, if Chelsea had taco stands, Chick-fil-A, and four lanes of traffic.
Ever wary of leaving stones unturned, I thought this month’s dispatch from the West Coast should foreground spaces located east of Western Ave, proving that there remains much to behold on this side of town. I invited four writers to cover an exhibition of their choosing, within that one parameter. Their respective reviews are as heterogeneous as the shows they selected and the neighborhoods they traveled to, but they all prove that making the journey will be more than worthwhile.—Juliana Halpert
Milano Chow
Hollyhock House | 4800 Hollywood Blvd
Through Dec. 20
Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s stucco-and-stone masterpiece and Los Angeles’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, crowns a hilltop in East Hollywood. In a far southern corner of the house, in a pink-walled bedroom originally built for the young daughter of oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, nine works by the LA-based artist Milano Chow rest on mantels and cabinets or hang on freestanding folding screens. (Thumbtacks in Wright’s walls are, needless to say, verboten.)
Curated by Cole Akers, “Fantasy Street” features a selection of works on paper by Chow that, like the unfurnished bedroom in which they are displayed, are stately and somewhat desolate. Working in graphite and photo transfer, the artist builds minutely detailed grayscale compositions on layers of thick, cut paper to depict female figures lurking inside elaborate buildings, framed by windows and other interstices. A diptych of horizontal scrolls features lone women standing amid neoclassical colonnades; other drawings show figures loitering in a hotel entryway framed in brickwork or waiting within a ticket booth at an old movie theater.
Chow’s hand is precise; it’s easy to imagine the artist working in white gloves at a drafting table. Because of their tight formal treatment, these architectural scenes initially appear to reproduce real places. But the longer one looks, the more each turns strange and set-like, a nonsensical amalgamation of scale and era. In fact, they are partially real: Chow mined the photo archives of the Los Angeles Public Library for source material. The resulting works speak to a Los Angeles that famously takes no prisoners when it comes to collapsing time and place, whether through urban renewal schemes or on the silver screen.
Frank Lloyd Wright embraced this city’s stylistic lawlessness and used it as inspiration, affectionately terming his mix of Mayan, Roman, and Japanese motifs “California Romanza.” But Chow’s manner is a bit less brazen and a lot more enigmatic. It’s also a mystery whether her stylish heroines are proprietresses of these anachronistic buildings—or prisoners. Aline Barnsdall famously found the house unlivable.
Chow employs a draughtsman’s toolkit, iterating and splicing. Rather than creating schematics, however, she uses these methods to construct an atmosphere of mystique that is foundational to “Fantasy Street.” In a neighboring gallery, Chow extends her sensibility into curatorial practice with “Deborah Turbeville: The Lifted Veil,” an exhibition of the avant-garde fashion photographer’s ethereal images of similarly glamorous, alienated women.—Eileen Havant Townsend
Glenn Ligon
Hauser & Wirth | 908 East 3rd Street
Through Jan. 17, 2027
While down in LA doing a fellowship at the Huntington Museum, I visited Glenn Ligon’s exhibition “Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against the Door” at Hauser & Wirth. The show assembles the largest selection in 25 years of works from the artist’s incandescent “Coloring Book” paintings, made while Ligon was also at a residency—at the Walker Art Center between 1999 and 2001. Onto large, flat, grey and beige canvases, he reproduced pages from pro-Black children’s coloring books, published in the 1960s and ’70s. Ligon gave the black-and-white pages to children, then enlarged their manic (and beautiful) marks via silkscreen and oil crayon to very cathartic effect. Alongside this series, Ligon presents “Black Panther Coloring Book #1,” a new body of work that takes its source material from a publication by the same name, issued by the Black Panther Party in 1969.
The show conjured inescapable themes from my personal history: I was conceived at one of the historically Black colleges and universities, by parents who were involved in the Black Power Movement; I currently live in Oakland, where the Black Panther Party was founded and headquartered. All that aside, I was also deeply enraptured by these works’ colorful abandon, and the ways that their chaotic, nebulous rainbows reject the coloring lines’ rigid confines. I was of that ilk of demented children who mark every inch of a coloring book in caked-on crayon, so there was something vindicating about viewing similar gestures on canvases at this scale.
The movement fighting for social justice for African Americans has been a long, bloody, and continuous battle. But Ligon manages to find levity in a body of work about this fight. The artist winks at the fact that, alongside struggle, there is also so much joy, improvisation, and room for play. In an adjacent room, the 22 works on paper that make up “Black Power Coloring Book #1” provide a perfect counterpart. For the series, Ligon used pages from a publication issued by the Black Panthers, which the FBI later cited in its campaign to label the organization a hate group. Ligon obstructed the booklet’s illustrations by drawing black boxes over the illustrations in smudgy oil stick; only the accompanying text and the artist’s own black fingerprints remain.—Brontez Purnell
“Men Object Permanence or The Crack-Up“
O-Town House | 672 S. Lafayette Park Place, Suite 44 / 43
Through Nov. 7
For “Men Object Permanence or The Crack-Up,” the artist Jools Rothblatt—who had a solo show at O-Town House earlier this summer—curated a rowdy collection of works by 20 artists, many of them friends, even family. They nearly overwhelm the gallery’s two-story space in the historic Granada Buildings, near MacArthur Park. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture climb overhead, drop below the knee, and even spill into the kitchen and bathroom. The checklist functions as a map that is both territorial and social, plotting friendships one senses were forged over strong mutual affinities, drinks, and cigarettes.
Visitors are first greeted by Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s Critical Figure 10 (all works 2026) an anthropomorphic, skull-headed effigy installed in the center of the first floor. The figure floats on two thin steel rods above a black plinth, perched on a paint-spattered stool. From its chest, an exposed metronome swings menacingly. Nearby, Watch Your Step, by Lauren Sullivan stamps blue acrylic-paint boot prints on the stairs to the gallery’s second floor. Throughout the gallery’s various zones, Kim Fuck, Rothblatt’s punk-steeped alter ego, works in oil stick and spray paint on canvas and on the walls. In the bathroom, the tags breach the mirror, and I saw my face through a lipstick kiss.
Rothblatt also included a work by Andy Rothblatt, her great-uncle, whose oil on board painting of three women at a table adopts a smeared, instinctual style that mirrors Jools’s own. Their kinship becomes most clear when one rounds, dizzily, into the kitchen, where Rothblatt’s Drainers at the Healthy Chalet hangs above the splashback tile. Four figures in magenta, mustard, scarlet, and olive sit shoulder to shoulder in a cafe-bar.
The show title’s borrowed bit of child psychology is an apt angle. Here, object permanence seems to pertain most to the group of people involved, whose gestures and traces and ongoing associations with each other seem to float in the space like vapors, and surely will linger long after their work is taken down. —Jasminne Morataya
“BELLYMAN #5“
Bellyman | Address disclosed with appointment
After asking several times for an address to Bellyman, a project led by John Bogaard and co-curated with the artist Salim Green, I came to accept its mysterious nature and welcomed it as part of the gallery’s charm. Its obscurity contributes to the overall experience of a project space that recalls an alternative and discreet style of exhibiting in Los Angeles that once was more common. One of the artists in the show eventually told me to use Purgatory Pizza, a restaurant in Boyle Heights, as a reference point, and gave me directions that led around the back of the building, through an alley littered with confetti and empty bottles, to a gate, cracked open.
In the gallery’s courtyard, a homemade kiln by Sophie Friedman-Pappas, titled Department 2, 2025–26, rests on top of a halfway unfurled roll of red paper. The work sets a tone, demonstrating how materials, through a rejection of their intrinsic properties, are capable of being altered in form rather than created or destroyed. Inside the gallery, works similarly transmogrify found objects and natural materials: Ethan Shaw’s The Committee on Starch, 2026, features a found louvered door that the artist has covered in paint and soot; Deondre Davis adorned a plastic engine mount with red artificial eyelashes for an untitled sculpture, and Ross Simonini contributed a painting made of milk paint, plus “food and beverage” on a cotton napkin.
A sound installation by Simonini, Paul McCarthy, and Alex Stevens plays from several speakers in the back gallery; each one rests on top of a clear, storage bag filled with a Justin Bieber fleece blanket, meant to act as a makeshift speaker isolator. The audio consists of a collage of disparate field recordings and improvisation samples incorporating elements that find commonality in their relationship to the artist’s daily routines. While there’s nothing new about the form of assemblage or the readymade in the works on view here, these strategies manage to transcend their more common, historical applications, underscoring our contemporary relationships to the tangible world, to cheap, accessible materials, and to our ever-accelerating, intractable consumer cultures. —Keko Jackson
More of our favorite stories from the Critics’ Table
The Critics’ Table in London: Emily LaBarge Review 11 Shows
Four Critics Walk into a Bar…and Debate the Met’s Pollock-Krasner Retrospective
Is LA Still a Painter’s Town? Juliana Halpert on the City’s Fall Gallery Openings
Five Nights on Elizabeth Street: Whitney Mallett’s Guide to the Fall Openings
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