(Illustration © Gibson Kochanek; images from LACMA, The Huntington, CAAM, The Skirball, The Broad)
9 captivating artworks to see in L.A. that redefine ‘American’
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There are always plenty of compelling reasons to visit Los Angeles museums, especially right now. But as the 250th birthday of America looms large in the nation’s consciousness, our institutions are replete with works of art exploring and expounding upon, in celebration and critique, what it means and what it feels like to be an American.
As America celebrates 250 years, we size up how it’s been portrayed in, and has shaped, what we watch, listen to and read.
These works of art illuminate how race, gender, class and politics frame, reframe, bestow and withhold American-ness and how artists claim it for themselves regardless. Across painting, photography, video, installation, sculpture and more — here are nine impressive and eclectic works you can experience now.
Showing Artworks
Sadie Barnette: 'How to Fly' at CAAM
Exposition Park Photomural
(CAAM)
Barnette’s site-specific photomural transforms the museum’s expansive atrium into a vivid, hot pink and heartfelt visual archive. Family snapshots, important books and California streetscapes dance across a saturated jewel-tone ombré backdrop. Barnette embellishes these personal histories with her signature motifs of glitter, rhinestones, vintage cars and lush plant life, creating an intentional overload of prismatic color and texture. Beneath this joyful aesthetic lies an incisive, unsettling archive of her family’s experience with aggressively racist state surveillance and the simultaneous story of reclamation, justice and the continuing struggle she unpacks in her work.
Barnette incorporates references to her father’s 1960s FBI surveillance file from his time in the Black Panther Party, alongside recollections of his ownership of a San Francisco gay bar. The federal government weaponized both of these legacies as dangerous “un-American acts,” but by monumentalizing these archival fragments amid celebratory scenes of family life, Barnette joyfully challenges systemic historical erasure and expands the definition of what it can mean to be American.
🗓️ On view through Oct. 3, 2027
Barnette incorporates references to her father’s 1960s FBI surveillance file from his time in the Black Panther Party, alongside recollections of his ownership of a San Francisco gay bar. The federal government weaponized both of these legacies as dangerous “un-American acts,” but by monumentalizing these archival fragments amid celebratory scenes of family life, Barnette joyfully challenges systemic historical erasure and expands the definition of what it can mean to be American.
🗓️ On view through Oct. 3, 2027
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Expo Park / USC Station
Arthur Jafa: 'White Album' at the Hammer
Westwood Experimental film
(The Hammer)
In this 30-minute film collage that the artist has called “a social critique of whiteness,” Jafa delivers a fast-paced, disorienting, enlightening assemblage of found footage, internet clips and music videos using his signature editing technique. Tracing how Black creative innovations are systemically appropriated by mainstream culture, Jafa highlights the paradox of Black artists being lauded as transcendent national stars while their foundational contributions are subsumed into a broader, extractive and exclusionary definition of American talent.
As high-definition digital textures clash with degraded, pixelated viral videos and the landscape shifts from gospel and blues to electronic beats, the affecting work mirrors the chaotic acceleration of contemporary media. In dismantling the visual currency of supremacy, it repositions Black brilliance as a core, indispensable force within the country’s cultural identity.
🗓️ On view through Aug. 30
As high-definition digital textures clash with degraded, pixelated viral videos and the landscape shifts from gospel and blues to electronic beats, the affecting work mirrors the chaotic acceleration of contemporary media. In dismantling the visual currency of supremacy, it repositions Black brilliance as a core, indispensable force within the country’s cultural identity.
🗓️ On view through Aug. 30
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Kara Walker: 'African't' at the Broad
Downtown L.A. Cut paper on wall
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(The Broad)
This panorama spans nearly 70 feet across a dedicated curved-wall gallery shared with related series from the Broad’s deep holdings of Kara Walker’s work. Executed entirely in her signature black cut-paper silhouette format, the installation stages an unsparing theater of antebellum and Reconstruction-era social passion plays peopled by archetypes of enslavers and the enslaved. The fluid, delicate lines of Walker’s hand-cut figures present a jarring formal contrast to the explicit violence and systemic degradation they perform. Repurposing this aggressively genteel 19th-century craft idiom dismantles any historical romanticism attached to the era, implicating the viewer directly in a disturbing cycle of aestheticization, caricature and voyeurism. Although those dynamics persist in contemporary society, art like Walker’s holds the power to never forget where it started.
🗓️ On view permanently
🗓️ On view permanently
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Grand Ave Arts / Bunker Hill Station
rafa esparza: '…we are the mountain' at LACMA
Mid-Wilshire Acrylic on adobe panel
(LACMA)
Hand-formed adobe composed of earth, water and hay constitute the physical framework of rafa esparza’s “…we are the mountain,” featured in the newly opened permanent collection rotation at LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries. The raw material presence favored in many formats by the artist introduces not only a distinct, grounding texture and an aroma of sun-baked soil, but also forces a confrontation between ancestral Indigenous technologies and contemporary institutional art world environments. As esparza utilizes these textured blocks to explore the complex, shifting dynamics of the United States-Mexico border, his narratives examine how crossing this arbitrary yet literal line in the sand alters human consciousness, generating new dimensions of identity that transform into enduring family histories over generations. In Los Angeles, a metropolis constructed atop these lineages and by the labor of those who came here searching, the artist positions the soil as a witness to history and emblematic of the immigrant experience.
🗓️ Ongoing
🗓️ Ongoing
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Wilshire / Fairfax Station
Sandy Rodriguez: 'Book 13' at the Huntington
San Marino Installation
(The Huntington)
This multi-aspected installation is a 20-foot-wide, four-panel map of the United States that grew out of the artist’s research residency at the institution. Sandy Rodriguez combines the massive cartographic work with detailed botanical portraits, a hand-gilded artist codex and landscape painting. The work juxtaposes traditional Mesoamerican materials with 19th-century boundary surveys and Western expansionist maps from the Huntington’s archives. The irregular, fibrous texture of the bark paper counters the clinical lines of imperial mapmaking. On the central map, she paints contemporary imagery — Border Patrol vehicles, detention centers and militarized police — alongside historical references to Indigenous child removal and federal boarding schools. It’s a stark visual timeline that exposes centuries of state-sanctioned displacement. By embedding native flora and regional ecology into these disputed borders, Rodriguez reclaims suppressed histories, quietly decolonizing the collection and reframing the territory as a continuous record of Indigenous survival.
🗓️ On view through April 2027
🗓️ On view through April 2027
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See Lee: Hmong Story Cloth at the Autry
Griffith Park Embroidered textile
(The Autry Museum)
The Autry’s current exhibition, “Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles” is an excellent show that takes a deep regional dive pegged to its 250th American anniversary programming. Of all the pieces, See Lee’s meticulously stitched “Hmong Story Cloth” (circa 1980) is a poignant chronicle of making the journey to an unknown future in the United States. Utilizing the traditional paj ntaub embroidery format, the textile documents Lee’s family fleeing war-torn Laos and resettling in Long Beach during the 1970s. The narrative unfolds in sequential sections depicting military violence at a chaotic crossing of the Mekong River; lower panels remember Thai refugee camps, a rescue airplane and a Greyhound bus. This visual testimony shares striking cross-currents with Latin American arpilleras and paños Chicanos, linking disparate diasporic traditions through the shared language of quietly political, deeply personal needlework — in this case, preserving a crucial chapter of Southeast Asian migration to Southern California.
🗓️ On view through Jan. 31, 2027
🗓️ On view through Jan. 31, 2027
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Scott Carrillo Azevedo: 'The American Home — The Broken Promise' at Long Beach Museum of Art
Long Beach Painting
(Courtesy of albertz benda, Los Angeles)
Scott Carrillo Azevedo recently opened a solo exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art, called “The American Home — The Broken Promise.” Despite the melancholy of that title, it is difficult to escape Azevedo’s canvases’ almost suffocating, dreamlike beauty. He meticulously lifts Midcentury interior design layouts from vintage lifestyle magazines, reconfiguring these idealized, pristine domestic spaces into surreal backdrops. His technique channels an elevated SoCal lowbrow aesthetic, blending post-Impressionist exotica into the style. This deliberate intersection with traditional art history reclaims physical and cultural spaces historically denied to many, drawing directly from memories of housing redlining in Los Angeles, forced assimilation and queer precarity. The paintings employ exuberant palettes and intricate floral patterns to transform generations of marginalization into gorgeous, defiant testaments.
🗓️ On view through Aug. 9
🗓️ On view through Aug. 9
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Lauren YS: 'Nine-Tailed Fox' at USC Pacific Asia Museum
Pasadena Digital image on lenticular print
(Joshua White / JW Pictures)
Swirling, saturated colors and hyper-vivid iconography define Lauren YS (a.k.a Squidlicker)’s incandescent new work in “Mythical Creatures: The Stories We Carry” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Lauren YS utilizes a fluid, hallucinatory style to chart how post-immigration generations experience both the alienation from and the active reclamation of ancestral lineage. Per the exhibition’s fascinating remit and its eclectic results, the digital image on lenticular print engages in a direct visual dialogue with artifacts drawn from the institution’s permanent collection. As bioluminescent figures morph across the composition from various angles, this vivid staging rejects the notion of heritage as a static historical relic. Instead it transforms traditional Asian mythological tropes about the nine-tailed fox into an electric contemporary vernacular. Lauren YS charts the psychological tension of losing, finding or intentionally deepening a connection to inherited practices as we rush into a future that threatens to leave them behind.
🗓️ On view through Sept. 6
🗓️ On view through Sept. 6
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Memorial Park Station
Adam Silverman: 'Common Ground' at the Skirball Cultural Center
Brentwood Ceramics
(Robert Wedemeyer/The Skirball)
The plates, bowls, cups and ceremonial pots in Adam Silverman’s ceramic ode to America were all hand-thrown from a single composite clay body made by collecting then blending raw clay, water and wood ash gathered from all 50 American states, Washington D.C., and the five inhabited United States territories. As Silverman systematically remixed these distinct geological materials, the clay became more than a metaphor — it became a functional 224-piece tableware set intended to be used. Though resting in its backlit case between activations, public dinner services inside the galleries use the settings to elevate the simple act of sharing a meal with strangers into a structural extension of the artwork. But even in its passive display form, to contemplate the collection’s lyrical, earthen poetry and to realize that it’s literally made of America — like the Great Seal says, out of many, one — is to imagine what is possible for all of us.
🗓️ On view through Jan. 3, 2027
🗓️ On view through Jan. 3, 2027
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