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The best 10 Los Angeles Art Shows in 2021
22/12/2021

The best 10 Los Angeles Art Shows in 2021


by Elisabetta Roncati

As we promised two weeks ago, after having analyzed NY art scene, it’s the turn of LA.
It has been a great “art” year also in the City of Angels, even with the pressure caused to Covid-19 pandemic.

So let’s go!
As usual some of the art shows can be still visited


1. Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
September 12, 2021–June 6, 2022


At the former police car warehouse in L.A.'s Little Tokyo Historic District, renovated by the noted California architect Frank Gehry, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (formerly The Temporary Contemporary) opened in 1983. This location offers 40,000 square feet of exhibition space and until the sixth of June 2022 will host the first West Coast survey of the internationally renowned Swiss media artist Pipilotti Rist. Rist’s installations explore relationships of video and the body, exterior environments and interior psychological landscapes, reason and instinct. The exhibition surveys more than thirty years of the Zürich-based artist’s work, encompassing early single-channel videos; large-scale installations brimming with color and hypnotic musical scores; sculptures that merge everyday objects, video, and decorative forms.








2. Yoshitomo Nara

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
April 1, 2021–January 2, 2022


Yoshitomo Nara (born in 1959) is among the most beloved Japanese artists of his generation. His widely recognizable portraits of menacing figures reflect the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self. A peripatetic traveler, Nara’s oeuvre takes inspiration from a wide range of resources: memories of his childhood, music, literature. Spanning over 30 years from 1987 to 2020, Yoshitomo Nara views the artist’s work through the lens of his longtime primary passion: music. Featuring album covers Nara began collecting as an adolescent, paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, an installation that recreates his drawing studio, and never-before-exhibited idea sketches that reflect the artist’s empathic eye, this exhibition shines a light on Nara’s conceptual process. One of the main highlights will be “Miss Forest”, a 26-foot outdoor painted bronze sculpture that will grace Wilshire Boulevard.








3. Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance

The J. Paul Getty Museum
October 19, 2021–January 9, 2022


The 16th-century German artist Hans Holbein the Younger created portraits for a wide range of patrons like scholars, statesmen, and courtiers in Switzerland and England. Holbein’s drawings and paintings, enriched by inscriptions and evocative objects, offer richly detailed visual statements of personal identity. Thanks to the first major presentation of Holbein’s art in the United States visitors can explore the Renaissance culture of scholarship, self-definition and luxury.







4. Black American Portraits

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
November 7, 2021–April 17, 2022


This exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning over two centuries from 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from LACMA’s permanent collection and highlights emancipation and early studio photography, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, and multiculturalism of the 1990s. “Black American Portraits” chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance.







5. Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective

Museum of Latin American Art
July 2021 - March 2022


“Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective” is the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of the internationally renowned Chicana muralist, public intellectual and community activist, Judy Baca. Baca is a painter, muralist, community arts pioneer and scholarly-educator who has been teaching in the UC system for more than 30 years. As founder of the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into the non-profit Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), Baca has been engaged in the creation of sites of public memory within historically disenfranchised communities since 1976. She continues to serve as SPARC's artistic director while employing digital technology to co-create collaborative murals at the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital Mural Lab.







6. April Bey: Atlantica, The Gilda Region

California African American Museum
May 26, 2021 - January 17, 2022


In “Atlantica, The Gilda Region”, April Bey’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, the Bahamian-American interdisciplinary artist presents an immersive installation that taps into Black Americans’ historical embrace of space travel and extraterrestrial visioning, a cultural movement dating back to the late 1960s and later termed Afrofuturism. Through this Afrofuturist lens, Bey reflects on subjects such as queerness, feminism, and internet culture in vibrant tableaux that combine living plants, video, music, photography, and oversized mixed-media paintings and textiles. The artist positions herself as an alien from the planet Atlantica, while her mission on Earth is to observe and report as an undercover agent. This imagined world and her general interest in storytelling come from her father, who would tell her childhood tales using alien narratives to illustrate how Black people were othered in the United States and The Bahamas. In contrast to the racial oppression and exploitation rampant on Earth, Atlantica offers a beautiful diasporic world in which Black people thrive and flourish.







7. Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe

Benton Museum of Art / Armory Center for the Arts
September 1–December 18, 2021


The Armory presentation was a selection of sculptures, while the artwork at the Benton included paintings and drawings. Deeply rooted in the connections between matter and spirit, all of the artworks at the Armory and the Benton featured powerful Black female figures with muscular limbs, solid torsos, and direct gazes. They shared a sense of confidence and project emotional, psychological, and spiritual strength.
According to the ancient Greek theory of the five elements of nature, aether represents the spiritual and non-material and suggests physical matter. In Of Aether and Earthe, the Armory showcased work that suggested elements of air, fire, and aether, while the Benton highlighted work that emphasized grounded, earthly, and watery qualities. The artworks shown here represented Saar’s signature style of artmaking and her interest in personal and cultural stories. For many years, Saar’s artwork has revealed hidden histories and timeless myths and represents ordinary Black individuals celebrating their power, uplifted by their hopes and guided by their dreams.







8. Queer Communion: Ron Athey

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
June 19–September 5, 2021


“Queer Communion: Ron Athey” was the first major U.S. solo museum presentation of renowned Los Angeles-based performance artist Ron Athey (b. 1961). As one of the most generative and important performance artists to emerge in the twentieth century, Athey challenges traditional limits of artistic practice activating the body as a site of trauma, resistance, sexuality, and religious ecstacy. The artist, who has been HIV positive since the mid-1980s, explores pain, fetishism, power, and queer politics, commenting on the intersections and synergies among Christian fundamentalist religious traditions and ritual, through highly visceral performances and interventions. This exhibition was a historical survey of Athey’s internationally influential body of work, tracing the development of his artistic practice outside of institutions in the music (post-punk and goth), literature, and self-publishing scenes of the 1980s before he gained an international profile and wider exposure in the 1990s.







9. Made in LA: A Version

Hammer Museum and the Huntington
April 17–August 1, 2021


In “Made in LA: A Version” were presented 30 artworks of Los Angeles–based artists. The exhibition featured new installations, videos, films, sculptures, performances, and paintings, many commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
Funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, three awards totaling $150,000 were given to artists in the exhibition: the Mohn Award, the Career Achievement Award—both of which were selected by a professional jury—and the Public Recognition Award, which was determined through votes cast by visitors to the exhibition.







10. Nikita Gale: Private Dancer

California African American Museum
March 27–May 9, 2021


For Nikita Gale’s first solo museum exhibition, the Los Angeles-based artist took the common, shared experience of music concerts as a starting point for questioning more abstract ideas of spectacle, desire, and refusal. Gale’s research-based practice frequently centers on readily available objects and ubiquitous consumer technologies assembled in unexpected ways. In the installation at CAAM, theatrical lighting trusses were transformed into sculpture, and programmed lights “dance” to an unheard soundtrack of music by Tina Turner, an icon the artist has been referencing for over six years. By isolating the visual language of live performance in the gallery and separating it from the expectation of audio, Gale created an uncanny experience that serves as a meditation on the limits of the body, the demands of celebrity, and silence as a political position.








Born in Genoa, Milanese by adoption, Elisabetta Roncati decided to combine her university education in economics and management with her passion for culture with a goal: bringing people closer to the art market in a clear, easily understandable and professional way. Interested in all forms of artistic and cultural expressions, contemporary and otherwise, she has two great passions: textile art and African art. As an art consultant, she firmly believes that culture has the power to transcend the boundaries of individual nations, creating a global community of art lovers. In 2018 he founded the registered trademark Art Nomade Milan that she uses to speak about art and culture on the main social media platforms.

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