Roy Lichtenstein‘s painting Desk Calendar, 1962, part of MOCA‘s permanent collection, was on view at the museum in 2024 as part of the exhibition Reverberations.
May 212026
Apr 212026
Todd Gray, “The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time)”, 2024, Two UV pigment prints on Dibond, artist’s frames
In LA-based artist Todd Gray’s The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time), two images, one of Iggy Pop and the other of a statue in Italy, merge both visually and conceptually. It was on view as part of While Angels Gaze, his exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in NYC in 2025.
About the work from the gallery-
In The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time) (2024)—one of the exhibition’s smallest works, composed of just two panels—Gray depicts Iggy Pop in black and white, his image overlaid against a statue from Villa Torlonia of a figure holding a pan flute. The gesture of the statue’s outstretched arm on the left is mirrored in Iggy’s raised hand on the right, connecting the two figures across time as if by an invisible thread. The image suggests an enduring human archetype, different and yet unchanged over the course of many centuries, and invites wider questions about the essence of human nature.
Gray’s latest solo exhibition, Portals, is currently on view in Perrotin‘s new Los Angeles gallery through until 5/30/26. His commissioned piece, Octavia’s Gaze, was installed last year at LACMA in the new David Geffen Galleries, which are opening to the general public in May (they are currently open to members only).
Apr 172026
Today’s flashback is to Noah Davis‘s Imitation of Wealth installation which was shown in MOCA’s storefront space in 2015. Sadly, Davis passed away before it opened.
Some of these works are currently on view as part of his gorgeous retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
From MOCA’s website about the installation-
One of the unique characteristics of the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles is the proliferation of artist-run spaces, many of which are located in storefronts across the city. MOCA was founded by artists and, due to its philosophy of placing artists at the center of its mission, has long been known as “the artist’s museum.” Storefront continues this tradition by inviting two artist-run organizations to take over MOCA’s Marcia Simon Weisman Works on Paper Study Center each year.
Founded in 2012, The Underground Museum is a storefront space developed by artist Noah Davis. Located at 3508 West Washington Avenue in Los Angeles’s Arlington Heights neighborhood, The Underground Museum has a gallery space, offices that serve as editing suites and a painting studio, and an outdoor garden which hosts parties, events, and film screenings. Davis wanted to bring what he called “museum-quality art” to a traditionally African American and Latino working-class neighborhood. However, when The Underground Museum first opened, no museums were willing to lend such works. Undaunted, Davis decided to recreate iconic artworks by famous artists such as Marcel Duchamp, On Kawara, and Jeff Koons. The title for his inaugural exhibition, Imitation of Wealth, alludes to Douglas Sirk’s classic film Imitation of Life (1959), a pre-civil rights era melodrama about passing. Just as the film’s protagonist pretends to be white in order to escape the fate of the second-class citizenship offered to African Americans, the works in the exhibition masquerade as famous works of art in an attempt to break down the traditional class and ethnic barriers to high culture. Irreverent and tongue-in-cheek, Imitation of Wealth stages many of art’s time-honored questions about the nature of truth and authenticity.
The Underground Museum, where this work was first shown, was a unique and special place that held many great exhibitions and events. After Davis’s death it was run by his wife, artist Karon Davis (who co-founded the space), and his brother filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. The museum closed in 2022.
Below are some images from a visit in 2019.
Front doors of the Underground Museum
Two views of the outdoor space at the museum-
Along with the galleries, bookstore, and outdoor spaces, you could even find artwork in the bathrooms. The unique wallpaper collage seen below was created by Genevieve Gaignard.
Objects in the bathroom at the Underground Museum
Wallpaper detail
Apr 142026
“Early Snow – Rhinecliff Hotel”, 2017, oil on canvas
“Durham, August 14, 2017”, 2017, oil on canvas
American painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer passed away last week at the age of 46. The images above are from her 2017 exhibition Wild and Blue at Marlborough gallery in NYC. She had also been part of the Whitney Biennial earlier that same year.
The first painting is of the Rhinecliff Hotel, a bar she frequented while growing up in Rhinebeck, NY. The second, Durham, August 14, 2017, is of the metal confederate statue that protesters tore down that year. That painting was also included in her section of Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum‘s biennial exhibition of artists from the Los Angeles area. Her later work was often very political, including several paintings that are dense with imagery.
In this 2018 Bomb magazine interview, Dupuy-Spencer discusses some of her past struggles and provides insights into her practice.
Her first solo exhibition in five years, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, will open at Deitch in Los Angeles this Saturday, 4/18/26.
Dec 222025
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born today, December 22nd, in 1960. The painting above, Untitled (1981) is currently on view at The Broad in Los Angeles.
From the museum about this work-
Many of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings are in some way autobiographical, and Untitled may be considered a form of self-portraiture. The skull here exists somewhere between life and death. The eyes are listless, the face is sunken in, and the head looks lobotomized and subdued. Yet there are wild colors and spirited marks that suggest a surfeit of internal activity. Developing his own personal iconography, in this early work Basquiat both alludes to modernist appropriation of African masks and employs the mask as a means of exploring identity. Basquiat labored over this painting for months — evident in the worked surface and imagery — while most of his pieces were completed with bursts of energy over just a few days. The intensity of the painting, which was presented at his debut solo gallery exhibition in New York City, may also represent Basquiat’s anxieties surrounding the pressures of becoming a commercially successful artist.
In the video below (also from The Broad) LeVar Burton discusses the work and its possible connection to Basquiat’s childhood and family.
Dec 052025
In addition to his numerous street art pieces, Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, has shown his unique creations in various galleries around the world. The works above are from his 2018 exhibition Annihilation at Over the Influence gallery’s temporary location in Los Angeles.
From the gallery about the show-
Presenting a reflection on the current model of globalized development and the forces shaping and affecting local identities around the world today, Annihilation emphasizes the global impact of Los Angeles culture and the subsequent breakdown of unique global identities across continents. For his first solo exhibition in the United States since 2011, Vhils has taken the opportunity to set up a dialogue between the United States, Europe, and China to address the growing struggle for hegemonic supremacy between global powers and the ensuing social and economic impact on the world at large. Annihilation shares the stories of the citizens who breathe vitality into densely populated urban epicenters. Based on a variety of source material, from advertisements collected in cities worldwide to salvaged wooden doors, the new patchwork-like series intentionally dilutes the readability of each individual portrayed, a reflection on how identity is both formed and affected by the city’s visual discourse. This intentional juxtaposition of contrasts mirrors the interplay between elements from various cultures which we observe at work today in large urban contexts.
Vhils-Strata, which presents a selection of his work from the past twenty years, is currently on view at the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) in Munich, Germany until 3/1/26.
He also recently created the site-specific installation, Doors of Cairo, located near the Pyramids in Giza in Egypt. It is part of Forever is Now 05 and is on view until 12/7/25.
Dec 032025
Robert Therrien‘s larger than life sculpture of a table and chairs for Under The Table (1994) has been delighting visitors to The Broad in Los Angeles for years. Robert Therrien: This is a Story, recently opened at the museum is the largest exhibition of the late artist’s work to date.
From The Broad about the exhibition-
Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation showcases Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.
The exhibition is on view until 5/5/2026.
Oct 022025
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita)’s print I Should Like to Be Able to Love My Country and Still Love Justice, 1968, was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in June of 2024.
From the museum about the artist-
Corita Kent, also known in the Catholic Church as Sister Mary Corita, incorporated a range of references into her silkscreen prints, spanning pop culture imagery and song lyrics, biblical allusions, and literary conceits. After seeing Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, she was inspired to embrace the language of Pop art, using bold, graphic designs to convey anti-war messages. In the 1980s Kent’s posters and ephemera were collected by PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), a New York-based art activism group with a mission to create an archive of politically concerned art and ephemera from around the world. The materials are now part of the MoMA Archives, Library, and Research Collections.
You can currently see some of her photographic archive at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles for the exhibition Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images, on view until 1/24/26. The show “focuses on a little seen part of Corita’s artistic practice: her archive of over fifteen thousand 35 mm slides that she and her cohorts took between 1955 and 1968 while she was a beloved teacher in the art department at Immaculate Heart College”.
As part of their press release they include this lovely quote from the artist-
“In a sense, the whole world around the artist is his source, his sorting and relating powers are his sorcery, and the one isn’t much good without the other. … Anything can be a source, even a mistake. The sorcery or the thievery is the art of relating sources into a new solution.”
Her work can also be seen in Los Angeles at the Corita Art Center. The center is free to visit on Saturdays (with appointment).
Sep 182025
Abstract expressionist artist Mark di Suvero‘s sculpture Declaration (pictured above) is located on the Venice Beach Boardwalk in Los Angeles. It was installed in 2001 to commemorate the Venice Art Walk’s 22nd year and in support of the Venice Family Clinic, a local organization that provides quality health care to those in need. Di Suvero turned 92 today, 9/18.
Although he is well known for his large sculptures, he is also a painter. Some of these works were shown in 2019 at L.A. Louver in Los Angeles along with some of his smaller sculptures (pictured below).
From the L.A. Louver press release about the paintings-
A selection of brilliant abstract paintings by the artist accompanies the sculptures. Like the sculptures, his paintings are never still. Created with dazzling colors in dense layers of linear and freeform gestures, they project a swirling sensation akin to the twirling movement in his three-dimensional works. Accented with phosphorescent paints, the works luminesce and reverberate even in the absence of light (and are especially dazzling when activated by black lights installed throughout the gallery space). “The heart of art is the search for form that is electrifying, that gives life to our vision,” explains di Suvero. “This is the language of emotion. Anesthetic is to kill feeling. Aesthetic is the opposite, aesthetic is feeling. The thing that is most important is the dream, the vision for what doesn’t exist that could exist.”
It was recently announced that L.A. Louver will be closing their Venice Beach space, but in happier news they will be donating the gallery’s complete archive and library to The Huntington in San Marino, California.
Jul 312025
The two large paintings pictured above are by Takako Yamaguchi and were on view as part of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing.
From the Whitney Museum website about the artist-
Takako Yamaguchi’s recent seascapes use meticulously rendered zigzags, tubes, and lines to suggest weather and other natural elements. They reflect Yamaguchi’s experimentation with what she calls “abstraction in reverse,” or taking recognizable forms, like clouds or waves, and abstracting them to the point of pattern. Her interest is less in nature itself than in the artifice that has allowed artists to represent it. The artist aims to paint “umbrellas” that will read as “trees,” referring to a quote by the poet Wallace Stevens, who said, “All of our ideas come from the natural world: Trees = umbrellas.”
The resulting paintings work against Western art historical ideas of “pure” abstraction. The luminous surfaces are intentionally decorative and structured using graphic techniques drawn from Mexican muralism and Japanese print design alike. Throughout her career, Yamaguchi has also resisted assumptions by critics that Japanese aesthetics are inherently minimalist, drawing from the most opulent and intricate aspects of Japanese visual culture.
Yamaguchi’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles is currently on view at MOCA until 1/4/26.