10 Art Shows to See in Los Angeles This August (2024)

August can be a slow month in the art world, but the 10 shows below offer some visual and conceptual delights before the big fall openings. UPEND gathers new perspectives on feminist solidarity and activism in the face of our current reactionary backsliding, while PUNK LIVES shows the long legacy of transgression and tumult that punk progenitors laid down 50 years ago. At Track 16 Gallery, a multi-faceted call to arms through the work of 35 artists encourages visitors to sit in our unease and glimpse new ways of living. Lila de Magalhaes’s captivating fabric works reveal the sex lives of insects and other life forms, while Dogs & Dads offers a reappraisal of its two titular symbols of power and authority.

Lila de Magalhaes: Laps of Chrysalis

Lila de Magalhaes’s dyed and embroidered works depict fantastical rococo dreamscapes of interspecies entanglements against the erotic backdrop of bedsheets. In “The Eden Project” (2024), a woman canoodles with a worm, while “Pleasure Dome” (2024) features an insectoid orgy atop a mound of steaming excrement. Sewn threads define forms against a fluid backdrop of vibrant color washes, conveying the messy metamorphosis of the show’s title.

Matthew Brown (matthewbrowngallery.com)
712 North La Brea Avenue, Fairfax, Los Angeles
Through August 10

UPEND: Female Experience and Activism

UPEND showcases a diverse group of female artists whose works employ themes of resistance and solidarity in the face of reactionary attacks on women’s rights and reproductive freedom. Participating artists include Elyse Pignolet, who embeds subversive text and images within traditional blue-and-white ceramics; Kayla Tange, who addresses voyeurism and trauma through evocative sculpture, performance, and video; and She Loves Collective, a group of women of Armenian heritage whose performances and installations focus on the ongoing displacement and destruction of their homeland at the hands of Azerbaijan.

Angels Gate Cultural Center (angelsgateart.org)
3601 South Gaffey Street, San Pedro, California
Through August 17

PUNK LIVES

PUNK LIVES explores the visual expression of the punk movement, from its DIY origins 50 years ago to subsequent generations of artists who carry on its rebellious spirit and transgressive approach to culture. Curated in collaboration with Destroy Art, a Bay Area organization dedicated to supporting punk art, the show features vintage and new work by punk pioneers including Gee Vaucher of the band Crass, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, Raymond Pettibon, and John Holmstrom, founder of Punk Magazine. Younger artists and musicians are also represented, including Marissa Paternoster, Girl Mobb, Edward Cushenberry, and Somer Stampley. Additionally, a participatory flyer project will honor the grassroots fusion of art and music that flourished in the underground punk club scene.

Subliminal Projects (subliminalprojects.com)
1331 Sunset Boulevard, Echo Park, Los Angeles
Through August 24

Dogs & Dads

Dogs & Dads is a three-artist exhibition that explores themes of rage, family, patriarchy, and companionship through images of canines and fathers. Karl Haendel’s photorealistic pencil-on-paper works such as “Angry Dog 6” (2023) meticulously capture the open maws and sharp fangs of snarling beasts, conveying a duality of protection and aggression. Taylor Marie Prendergast’s hazy, black-and-white paintings and drawings depict dogs with a melancholic gravitas and inscrutable psychological intensity. Meanwhile, David Sipress’s cartoons, originally published in publications like The New Yorker, provide wry comedic commentary on the challenges of existing with other beings in the world.

Diane Rosenstein Gallery (dianerosenstein.com)
831 Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through August 24

With the Moon Under Our Feet

Conceived as part of a monthly curatorial program titled Surrealist Study Group (SSG) at the Philosophical Research Society, With the Moon Under Our Feet brings together seven women artists whose work draws on futurism, surrealism, and portraiture to create new forms of bodily autonomy and feminist empowerment. Works in the show include Penny Slinger’s cosmic collages, Regina Herod’s baroque assemblages of wax, metal, and found objects, Lezley Saar’s paintings of psychics, and Jaklin Romine’s cruciform family altar draped in chiffon, velvet, and spandex.

Philosophical Research Society (prs.org)
3910 Los Feliz Boulevard, Los Feliz, Los Angeles
Through August 31

Steve Roden: floating over the silent world

Steve Roden was a wildly influential and respected artist and musician who passed away from Alzheimer’s disease last September at the age of 59. floating over the silent world pays tribute to his legacy with a selection of lesser-known paintings, drawings, and sculptures created between 1990 and 2019. Roden’s boundless curiosity is evident in his genre-blurring work, which places visual art, sound, science, and language in accessible conceptual frameworks. Notable works in the exhibition include “the surface of the moon” (2001), an early sculptural installation consisting of 490 hand-carved objects inspired by mountains and craters on a vintage lunar map; paintings from his multi-year series the silent world (2002–03); and “from 33 to 45” (2019), which consists of visual representations of the sound of his favorite albums. On Saturday, September 7 at 2 pm, Michael Ned Holte and Alison O’Daniel will host a conversation and series of remembrances of their friend and collaborator.

Vielmetter Los Angeles (vielmetter.com)
1700 South Santa Fe Avenue #101, Downtown, Los Angeles
Through September 7

When the Summer Bullet Sings

The 35 artists included in the ominously titled exhibition When the Summer Bullet Sings employ a heterogeneous range of artistic strategies, making for a lively group show as visual and conceptual tropes ping-pong around the gallery. Holding it all loosely together is a healthy skepticism of tradition and power, an engagement with the here and now, and a glimmer of hope that we might just all be OK on the other side of this long, hot, summer. Highlights include documentation of Nao Bustamante’s influential performances, Sandow Birk’s dark historical paintings, Karen Lofgren’s sculptures balancing fragility and menace, Molly Segal’s sexually charged watercolors, and Victor Gastelum’s spray-painted paintings of cop cars.

Track 16 Gallery (track16.com)
1206 Maple Avenue Suites 100 & 1005, Downtown, Los Angeles
Through September 7

Kyungmi Shin: Origin Stories

Kyungmi Shin layers images from art history, family photographic archives, mythological symbolism, and porcelain ceramics to tell new stories that reflect her experience as a Korean-American woman. Blending photography and painting, Shin excavates colonial histories, examining how various art forms have contributed to the construction of “the Orient” in the Western mind. Origin Stories features two-dimensional works as well as patterned porcelain, and an installation of her collection of found chinoiserie.

Craft Contemporary (craftcontemporary.org)
5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Through September 8

Filipino California: Art and the Filipino Diaspora

Greater Los Angeles is home to the largest community of Filipino Americans in the US, and the second-largest concentration of people of Filipino descent anywhere in the world next to Manila. Filipino California features the work of seven contemporary artists, offering multiple perspectives on life in the diaspora. Participating artists include Eliseo Art Silva, whose painting “Inang Kayumanggi ng California (The Brown Madonna of California)” (2022) is a depiction of syncretic non-Western Catholicism; Allison Hueman’s “The Mystery of Life” (2024), a surreal, fractured history painting; and the post-colonial sci-fi of Anthony Francisco’s “Creature Chronicles: Zarah Meets the Atrivians” (2022).

Forest Lawn Museum (forestlawn.com)
1712 South Glendale Avenue, Glendale, California
Through September 8

Welcome to the Covid Hotel

Welcome to the Covid Hotel is a multi-disciplinary exhibition that pays tribute to the Los Angeles County Department of Health workers who set up emergency Quarantine and Isolation (QI) sites for houseless Covid patients in vacant hotels and motels in Spring 2020. They ultimately served over 10,000 people, losing a remarkably low number of people to the disease, and were able to secure shelter for 93% of the patients who needed housing after treatment. The workers tell their accounts in their own words through video recordings mounted within a recreation of a motel QI site, offering a glimpse into their life-saving endeavors.

Skid Row History Museum and Archive (lapovertydept.org)
250 South Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles
Through December 14