As summer winds down and Los Angeles waits for its art season to open in earnest in early September, this is a deliberately light exhibition week — and one that belongs to the museums and institutions. Fittingly, it circles a single question — what it means to make something, and who or what gets to make it. The Hammer Museum sets the terms: SPACE IS THE PLACE, borrowing Sun Ra’s title, draws the museum’s contemporary collection into a meditation on belonging, placemaking, and the room a person is allowed to take up. Up in the Sepulveda Pass, the Skirball Cultural Center marks fifty years of punk with Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos — five hundred handmade flyers, zines, buttons, and safety-pinned garments, a whole subculture built with glue stick and photocopier.
Then the counter-argument, at DATALAND, Refik Anadol’s new museum inside Frank Gehry’s Grand LA: Machine Dreams: Rainforest generates a forest with no hand at all, a Large Nature Model dreaming greenery in real time. Back to the hand at The Huntington, where Mineo Mizuno’s Homage to Nature sits in the gardens as thrown clay and carved wood, left to weather in the landscape it honors. And in Claremont, the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art gives its namesake a survey: Samella! gathers six decades of Samella Lewis — painter, printmaker, and the historian who cut and inked images of Black life when few institutions would hang them. Hand and machine, flyer and forest — five ways of asking what an image is, and whose hand is behind it.
See the full lineup below.
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Featured Exhibitions
Hammer Museum | Westwood, Los Angeles
SPACE IS THE PLACE: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
On view through September 6, 2026
@hammer_museum
Borrowing its title from Sun Ra’s 1973 album and the cosmic film that followed, SPACE IS THE PLACE draws the Hammer’s contemporary collection into a meditation on belonging, placemaking, and the simple radical act of taking up room. The selection threads afrofuturist imagination through works that treat space — outer, inner, civic, domestic — as something to be claimed rather than granted, a place a person or a people decides to occupy. It is a collection show with an argument: that where you are allowed to exist has always been the first question art about liberation has to answer.
Skirball Cultural Center | Sepulveda Pass, Los Angeles
Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976–86
On view through September 6, 2026
@skirball_la
Fifty years on, punk gets the archival treatment it once defined itself against, and the Skirball leans into the irony with more than five hundred objects — handmade flyers, cut-and-paste zines, hand-lettered buttons and posters, and garments from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren — drawn from the New York, London, Los Angeles, and Washington scenes. Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos insists that punk’s real medium was the photocopier and the safety pin, a do-it-yourself visual culture assembled faster than any institution could sanction it. Dense, graphic, and cheerfully disreputable, it is a museum room that still sounds like a basement show.
DATALAND | DTLA, Los Angeles
Machine Dreams: Rainforest
On view through January 31, 2027
@datalandmuseum
DATALAND — Refik Anadol’s new museum inside Frank Gehry’s Grand LA, billed as the first devoted to the art of artificial intelligence — opens with Machine Dreams: Rainforest, a forest conjured entirely by a machine. Anadol’s Large Nature Model generates its greenery in real time across a wall of moving image, tuned by responsive sound, scent, and biometric feedback so that no two visitors watch quite the same forest. Set against a week of hand-thrown clay, hand-pulled prints, and hand-cut punk ephemera, it is the season’s sharpest provocation — an image with no hand behind it, dreaming nature back at the city that engineered it.
The Huntington | Pasadena
Mineo Mizuno: Homage to Nature
On long-term view in the Huntington gardens
@thehuntingtonlibrary
Mineo Mizuno sets ceramic and carved-wood works directly into the Huntington’s gardens, where Homage to Nature treats the vessel and the log not as objects to be pedestaled but as things returned to the ground that made them. Mizuno has spent a career moving between refined porcelain and rough-hewn timber, and here the two vocabularies meet outdoors — glazed forms and split wood set among living plantings, weathering with the season rather than sealed against it. It is a quiet argument that the most honest homage to nature is one you leave partly in nature’s hands.
Claremont Lewis Museum of Art | Claremont
Samella! Black as Lacquer and Iron
August 15 – November 15, 2026
@claremont_lmoa
The museum that carries Samella Lewis’s name gives her a survey worthy of it: painter, printmaker, and the art historian who founded the International Review of African American Art, Lewis spent six decades making and defending images of Black life across a century that too often refused them wall space. Black as Lacquer and Iron moves through her prints and paintings with an eye to their material weight — the bitten line of an etching, the density of a worked surface — and to the scholar’s discipline that ran alongside the studio. It is at once a homecoming and an overdue reckoning with an artist who built institutions as deliberately as she built pictures.
Also On View
West Hollywood
Signals in Formation — Bruce Rubenstein, Jeff Faust & Frederic Paul · Artplex Gallery · August 1 – September 11, 2026 · @artplexgallery
Dictation from the Other Side — Curated by Laura Whitcomb · Karma Gallery · Through September 12, 2026 · @karmakarma9
Beverly Hills
Lee Mullican: Silent Shades — Lee Mullican · Marc Selwyn Fine Art · Through September 5, 2026 · @marcselwynfineart
West Adams
Matthew Grabelsky: Kiddos — Matthew Grabelsky · Thinkspace Projects · Through August 29, 2026 · @thinkspace_art
Whittier
Follow a Line & Measure It — Enrique Castrejon · Rio Hondo Art Gallery · August 18 – September 17, 2026 · @riohondo_college
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