Prepare for an Influx of Influences

During the last two weekends, more than 60 new exhibitions have opened in commercial galleries across Los Angeles, from Venice to Chinatown. The fall art season is definitely underway.

Anchoring the season will be the last of the nation’s big millennial exhibitions, as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art devotes galleries in three buildings to “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000” (Oct. 22-Feb. 25). At more than 800 works, said to be the largest show ever organized or hosted by LACMA, the exhibition also celebrates the state’s 150th anniversary. The ambitious plan: a thorough, revisionist view of California’s cultural legacy.

Traveling retrospective exhibitions of two influential artists will arrive at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The wryly titled “2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II” (Oct. 8-Jan. 14) looks at the enigmatic sculptures, films, collages and drawings of the San Francisco pioneer of assemblage art. Next, “Paul McCarthy” (Nov. 12-Jan. 21) surveys the often scatological performance art and sculpture of the L.A.-based artist who made ketchup into an indispensable artistic medium.

The Skirball Cultural Center goes face to face, past and present, in “Revealing and Concealing: Portraits and Cultural Identity” (to Dec. 31), while the Santa Monica Museum of Art looks at Chicano art from the perspective of collectors, rather than curators, in “East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous” (to Nov. 18). The Long Beach Museum of Art brings out its permanent collection for a new $3.2-million seaside pavilion designed by architect Frederick Fisher (Sept. 24-March 18). And the J. Paul Getty Museum dips into one of the world’s finest collections for a look at a critical aspect of the Italian Renaissance in “Raphael and His Circle: Drawings From Windsor Castle” (Oct. 31-Jan. 7).

Farther south, Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum of Cultural Art offers “Egyptian Treasures From the British Museum” (Oct. 7-Jan.2), from one of the great repositories of ancient art, and the Orange County Museum of Art surveys the eye-bending “sculptural paintings” of veteran area artist Tony DeLap (Oct. 14-Jan.14).

San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art has organized “UltraBaroque” (Sept. 24-Jan. 7), an ambitious traveling survey of recent uses of Baroque traditions by artists working in five Latin American countries, and the San Diego Museum of Art goes after Populist nostalgia with “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” (Oct. 28-Dec. 31). Meanwhile, several organizations in the San Diego-Tijuana border region host the fourth edition of the binational contemporary art extravaganza, “inSITE” (Oct. 13-Feb. 25), featuring about 30 new works commissioned from three dozen U.S. and Latin American artists.