This Week in LA: August 13→19
In this Edition: Floating Cities of Consumer Ruin, a Photograph of Sunset Boulevard, and Afro-Cuban Presence, across LA
This week Los Angeles turns its attention to the image and everything that stands behind it — a street address, a face, a nation’s memory, a city assembled from what a culture throws away. At Gallery Luisotti, one of the city’s most committed photography dealers, six artists — including Marcel Alcalá and Maxfield Hegedus — take 1911 Sunset Boulevard, the address of the demolished Taix French Restaurant, as the occasion for a group meditation on place and what a building leaves behind. Nazarian / Curcio gathers Brian Bress, Widline Cadet, Kristin Calabrese and John Divola under The Other Side, four sensibilities pressing on what lies just past the surface of a picture — costumed video, diasporic memory, painted image, interrupted landscape. Across town in Hollywood, Make Room borrows John Berger’s title And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos for a group show that takes the photograph’s brevity as its premise, love and absence measured against the shortness of an image.
Downtown, Vielmetter Los Angeles gives the Afro-Cuban artist Roberto Diago the room for Presence, painting and mixed media rooted in the material history of the diaspora, where the humble stuff of a surface becomes testimony. And on La Brea, KP Projects hands its walls to Masakatsu Sashie, whose vast floating orb-cities — spheres packed with signage and consumer detritus, hovering over emptied landscapes — read as arks built from everything we discard. Five ways of looking hard at the picture and its underside, from a photographed address to a city made of junk.
See the full lineup below.
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Featured Exhibitions
Gallery Luisotti | DTLA, Los Angeles
1911 Sunset Boulevard
On view through September 12, 2026
@galleryluisotti
Gallery Luisotti gathers six contemporary artists — Marcel Alcalá, Maxfield Hegedus, Kittipong, Arturo Soto, Abdi Taslimi, and Evan Whale — for 1911 Sunset Boulevard, presented alongside Ed Ruscha’s landmark Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The title is the address of the former Taix French Restaurant, whose theatrical dining rooms, banquet halls, and murals hosted sixty years of private dinners and long nights on Echo Park’s stretch of Sunset before its demolition; the six artists’ photographs, altered photographic works, and one painting follow the restaurant through its final months, its closing night, and the flattened landscape left behind. It’s a show about what a building leaves as evidence once it’s gone — theater, memory, and a street address standing in for everything that happened inside it.
Nazarian / Curcio | Hollywood, Los Angeles
The Other Side
On view through September 5, 2026
@nazariancurcio
Nazarian / Curcio gathers four distinct sensibilities — Brian Bress, Widline Cadet, Kristin Calabrese and John Divola — under The Other Side, a group show that presses on whatever lies just past the surface of a picture. Between Bress’s costumed video figures, Cadet’s photographs of diasporic memory and intimacy, Calabrese’s painted image-making and Divola’s decades of staged and interrupted landscapes, the show reads less as a survey than as four ways of reaching behind the frame. What connects them is a shared suspicion that the image is a threshold rather than a wall — that there is always another side to what a photograph or a painting is willing to show.
Make Room | Hollywood, Los Angeles
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
On view through September 1, 2026
@makeroom.la
Make Room borrows its title from John Berger’s slim 1984 meditation on love, absence, and time — And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos — for a group show that takes the photograph’s very brevity as its premise. Bringing together Dane Nakama, Justin Cole and others, the exhibition treats the image the way Berger did: as something fleeting held against everything that outlasts it, a face remembered longer than the moment it was made. The result is a show about impermanence that keeps circling back to what refuses to fade — the picture as a small, stubborn stay against forgetting.
Vielmetter Los Angeles | DTLA, Los Angeles
Roberto Diago: Presence
On view through September 5, 2026
@vielmetter
Vielmetter gives the Afro-Cuban artist Roberto Diago the room for Presence, painting and mixed-media work rooted in the material history of the African diaspora in Cuba — humble stuff marshaled into surfaces that carry the weight of what they are made from. Diago works as much with matter as with image, letting worn and salvaged materials stand in for a history that official accounts have tried to keep out of frame. The title names the argument: a body of work that insists on presence where erasure was intended, testimony pressed into the surface itself.
KP Projects | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Masakatsu Sashie
On view through August 22, 2026
@kpprojectsgallery
KP Projects hands its walls to Masakatsu Sashie, the Japanese painter known for vast floating orb-cities — spheres packed with vending machines, signage, and the glittering detritus of consumer culture, hovering over depopulated landscapes like arks assembled from everything a society has thrown away. Presented by the gallery as Ambivalence, the paintings hold their tone exactly there, between wonder and dread: these hovering worlds are dazzling and derelict at once, monuments to abundance built entirely from its wreckage. Sashie makes the end of the world look like a shopping arcade that has finally achieved orbit.
Also On View
DTLA
20th Anniversary Group Show — Group Show · Corey Helford Gallery · Through September 12, 2026 · @coreyhelfordgallery
Expand and Contract: Notes about American Documentary Photography — Group Show · LA Center of Photography · Through September 12, 2026 · @la_centerofphoto
Pistolwish: InkMasks, InkClouds and Water Dancers — Pistolwish · LA Center for Digital Art · Through August 29, 2026 · @lacda_official
Mid-Wilshire
Show 8: Jaime Coffey, Garo & Gary Polonsky — TAG (The Artists Gallery) · Through August 28, 2026 · @taggallery
Mid-City
Humans: Prints by Dan McCleary — Dan McCleary · Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory · Through September 19, 2026 · @hannahsloan_curatorial
West Hollywood
Carole Vanderlinden: Fragmented Thought — Carole Vanderlinden · Karma · Through September 12, 2026 · @karmakarma9
West Adams
Pony Ma: Take the Bitter with the Sweet — Pony Ma · Thinkspace Projects · Through August 29, 2026 · @thinkspace_art
East Hollywood
Avery Suzuki: Inverted Miracle — Avery Suzuki · Niko Gallery · Through August 24, 2026 · @niko.losangeles
Santa Monica
Cici McMonigle: Tianjin, Florida — Cici McMonigle · Sabbatikal · Through September 2, 2026 · @sabbatikalspace
Glendale
ReCoding the Codex: Cultural Heritage through Language — Group Show · ReflectSpace at Glendale Central Library · Through October 10, 2026 · @myglendalelac
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LA Insider is the weekly newsletter that connects you to LA’s vibrant art and culture scene. From the Hollywood Hills to downtown, Malibu and beyond, we uncover a curated selection of standout exhibitions, cultural events, and creative experiences that define the City of Angels.
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