This week Los Angeles leans into the made thing — the staged photograph, the painted deity, the cast metal shield — and the long labor of building something meant to be looked at. The anchor is LACMA, where Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise gathers fifty years of an artist who has spent her whole career staging photographic and video fictions of domestic life, treating the family picture as a set to be lit, blocked, and performed rather than a moment to be caught. A few miles east on the same Saturday, two shows open within reach of each other: at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Brad Eberhard’s Building an Audience sets oil paintings into frames the artist makes himself, so the picture and the thing that holds it arrive as a single object; and at Track 16, John Collins turns downtown’s walls over to Graven Images to the Major Deities, paintings that summon gods and idols with a deadpan devotional charge.
Out at Bergamot Station, bG Gallery marks the turn of the season with Autumn Enchantment, a group show of painting and mixed media tuned to the shorter light. And in Claremont, the Benton Museum of Art gives Davina Semo a year-long room for Tender Shield, cast sculpture that makes protection feel weighty and physical — armor rendered as something almost tender. Five ways of building an image or an object and asking the city to stand in front of it.
See the full lineup below.
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Featured Exhibitions
LACMA | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise
August 23, 2026 – January 3, 2027
@lacma
LACMA gives Eileen Cowin a fifty-year survey, and the timing feels overdue for an artist who has spent her whole career treating the photograph as a set rather than a snapshot. Cowin stages photographic and video narratives that borrow equally from film and the family album — figures posed mid-gesture in domestic interiors, caught in scenes that hover just short of resolving into a single story. Between Panic and Paradise follows that long project across mediums, from her early black-and-white tableaux to recent video, insisting throughout that the most ordinary picture of a family is something built, lit, and directed rather than found. It is the season’s clearest argument that photography’s truth has always been a matter of staging.
Timothy Hawkinson Gallery | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Brad Eberhard: Building an Audience
August 22 – September 26, 2026
@timothyhawkinsongallery
Brad Eberhard’s Building an Audience opens Saturday with oil on canvas mounted over panel and set into frames the artist builds himself, so that the painting and the object holding it arrive as one continuous decision. The frames refuse their usual role as neutral border — they become part of the picture’s argument, closing the gap between the image and the thing on the wall. Eberhard’s surfaces reward slow looking, and the title’s wry nod to the labor of earning attention runs underneath the whole show: these are paintings frankly aware that they are asking to be watched.
Track 16 | DTLA, Los Angeles
John Collins: Graven Images to the Major Deities
August 22 – September 12, 2026
@track16gallery
Track 16 hands its downtown walls to John Collins for Graven Images to the Major Deities, a show that summons gods and idols with a deadpan devotional charge — painted and mixed-media images that take the old prohibition against graven likenesses and cheerfully ignore it. Collins builds a pantheon out of paint, letting reverence and irony share the same surface, so that each figure reads at once as sincere offering and knowing joke. The result is a downtown opening that treats mythology as living, disreputable, and very much still in circulation.
bG Gallery | Bergamot Station, Santa Monica
Autumn Enchantment
On view through September 5, 2026
@bggallery
bG Gallery marks the turn of the season with Autumn Enchantment, a group show of painting and mixed media tuned to shorter light and the particular spell of the year’s decline. Rather than a single argument, the exhibition offers a gathering of sensibilities — works that lean into warmth, atmosphere, and the slow chromatic shift that autumn brings even to a city that barely admits to seasons. It is bG at its most inviting: a room assembled to feel like the weather turning.
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College | Claremont
Davina Semo: Tender Shield
August 22, 2026 – June 27, 2027
@bentonatpomona
The Benton Museum gives Davina Semo a year-long room for Tender Shield, cast sculpture that makes protection feel weighty, physical, and strangely intimate. Semo works in bronze and cast metal with a sculptor’s respect for mass, but the title pulls the work toward something softer — armor rendered as care, defense that reads as tenderness rather than threat. Installed for the long run through next June, it is a show worth the drive to Claremont: an argument that the things we make to guard ourselves can carry as much feeling as the things they guard.
Also On View
DTLA
f8 Group Photography Show — Group Show · LA Artcore Union Center for the Arts · August 22 – September 11, 2026 · @laartcore
Wilhelm Neusser: Bogged Down — Wilhelm Neusser · Abigail Ogilvy · Through August 29, 2026 · @abigailogilvygallery
Chinatown
Alex Chaves: The Development Center: A Clownache Store — Alex Chaves · NOON Projects · August 26 – September 6, 2026 · @noonprojects
Culver City
Unbound | Group Show — Group Show · K&K Gallery · Through September 26, 2026 · @kkgalleryla
Between Earth and Sky: Nuraghe Piscu, Sardinia — YA Gallery · Through September 6, 2026 · @yaproject.space/
Hollywood
Shaghayegh Cyrous: Through the Sun — Shaghayegh Cyrous · Reisig and Taylor Contemporary · Through September 19, 2026 · @reisigandtaylorcontemporary
Mid-City
Hibiscus TV in Origins of Matter — Hibiscus TV · Matter Studio Gallery · Through September 13, 2026 · @matterstudiogallery
West Hollywood
Leica Emerging — Leica Gallery LA · Through August 31, 2026 · @leicagalleryla
West Adams
And After — Group Show, curated by Nathan Bennett · Good Mother Gallery · Through August 22, 2026 · @goodmothergallery
Long Beach
Flesh, Memory and Becoming — Group Show · Long Beach City College Art Gallery · Through September 3, 2026 · @lbcitycollege
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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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