This Week in LA: July 2→8
In this Edition: Fútbol in Miniature, the Hammer's Living Materials, and MOCA's Postwar Canon
This week the museums set the tone, and they keep circling the same question — what a material remembers. At MOCA, The Expanding Field draws three decades out of the permanent collection, the postwar experiments of Rothko, Mondrian, Rauschenberg, and Betye Saar gathered to show a city’s institution taking stock of the years just before it existed. Across town at the Hammer, Several Eternities in a Day hands the galleries over to twenty-two artists from across the Americas working in living materials — avocado, cacao, cochineal, clay — substances that evolve, decay, and drip, carrying the memory of Brown and Indigenous worlds in their very chemistry. And at LACMA, timed to the World Cup’s arrival in Los Angeles, Fútbol Is Life turns gum wrappers, glue, and paint into Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr.’s miniature “sportraits,” the world’s game rebuilt at the scale of a tabletop.
In Beverly Hills, Pace gives Mika Tajima’s 37 Dimensions the floor — installation and sculpture that pull the invisible arithmetic of bodies and technology out of the screen and give it weight and surface — while in West Hollywood, Megan Mulrooney stages Josh Cloud’s Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone, sculpture that lets material behave like geology, all accretion, erosion, and the slow chemistry of stone. Around them the week fills out with cosmic abstraction in West Hollywood, meditative geometry in Boyle Heights, a documentary reckoning with the war in Ukraine up in Glassell Park, and group shows from downtown to the harbor.
See the full lineup below.
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Featured Exhibitions
Hammer Museum | Westwood, Los Angeles
Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials
On view through August 23, 2026
@hammer_museum
The Hammer hands its galleries to twenty-two artists from North, Central, and South America for Several Eternities in a Day, a show built almost entirely from living materials — avocado, cacao, achiote, cochineal, stone, clay, and natural dyes. Organized by Pablo José Ramírez, the exhibition treats these substances as more than pigment or medium: they evolve, decay, drip, crumble, and evaporate, carrying the spirit and memory of Brown and Indigenous worlds in their chemistry. Across large-scale installation, painting, and mixed-media sculpture, the work reframes material itself as a record of the living and a repository of cosmic memory — art that is, quite literally, still changing on the wall.
LACMA | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Fútbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits by Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr.
On view through July 26, 2026
@lacma
Timed to the World Cup’s arrival in Los Angeles, LACMA’s Fútbol Is Life gathers the miniature “sportraits” of award-winning animator and visual-effects artist Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr. — meticulous little sculptures and stop-motion animations built from gum wrappers, glue, and paint. Barrois rebuilds iconic moments from women’s and men’s soccer at the scale of a tabletop, bringing a playful, emotional energy to the game’s grace and power. Rather than chasing spectacle or stardom, the show finds the world’s sport in the handmade and the intimate — the beautiful game reassembled one gum wrapper at a time.
MOCA | DTLA
The Expanding Field: MOCA’s Collection from the 1940s to 1970s
On view through September 20, 2026
@moca
MOCA draws three decades out of its permanent collection for The Expanding Field, a survey of work from the 1940s through the 1970s that reads as an institution taking stock of the years just before it existed. Organized by senior curator Anna Katz, the show gathers recent acquisitions alongside longtime mainstays — a gallery of Mark Rothko canvases, an I Am painting by Luchita Hurtado, and works by Piet Mondrian, On Kawara, Robert Rauschenberg, Betye Saar, and Anne Truitt among them — to trace the experimentation and global awareness that shaped postwar art in the decades leading up to MOCA’s 1979 founding. It is a collection show that doubles as an argument about how Los Angeles learned to look.
Pace Gallery | South La Brea / Mid-Wilshire
Mika Tajima: 37 Dimensions
On view through August 15, 2026
@pacegallery
Pace gives Mika Tajima the run of its Los Angeles space for 37 Dimensions, a body of new installation and sculpture that continues the artist’s long project of making data physical — translating the invisible arithmetic that governs bodies, labor, and technology into things you can stand in front of and feel. Tajima has always worked at the seam where the systemic meets the sensuous, and here the language of measurement, sensing, and prediction is pulled out of the screen and given weight, temperature, and surface. What remains is the residue of a system rendered as form — abstraction that carries the fingerprint of the machinery that produced it.
Megan Mulrooney | West Hollywood
Josh Cloud: Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone
On view through August 15, 2026
@meganmulrooneygallery
Megan Mulrooney stages Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone, a solo turn by Josh Cloud in which sculpture is allowed to behave like geology — accretion and erosion, the slow chemistry by which stone acquires its shimmer and its scars. Cloud treats the made object as something weathered rather than fabricated, each surface carrying the evidence of pressure and time as if it had been dredged up rather than built. The result is a body of work that feels found: forms poised between figure and mineral, between the sculpted and the merely survived.
Also On View
West Hollywood
The Cosmic View — Jordan Belson · Matthew Marks Gallery · Through August 15, 2026 · @matthewmarksgallery
Hollywood
Orders of Emergence — Gus Monday & Julian Lombardi · Make Room · Through August 1, 2026 · @makeroom.la
Boyle Heights
Meditations — Edith Baumann · parrasch heijnen · Through August 1, 2026 · @parraschheijnen
Glassell Park
Road of Life — Natasha Rudenko · Keystone Art Space · July 3 – 13, 2026 · @keystoneartla
Chinatown
Days Change at Night — Daniel Jack Lyons · NOON Projects · Through August 1, 2026 · @noonprojects
DTLA
Romance And Reality Will Kiss One Another — Royale Projects · Through August 30, 2026 · @royaleprojects
West Adams
dear artists… Streets, Structures & Stories — Group Show · Band of Vices · Through July 25, 2026 · @bandofvices
And After — Group Show, curated by Nathan Bennett · Good Mother Gallery · July 3 – August 22, 2026 · @goodmothergallery
San Pedro
Built on Water — Group Show · Angels Gate Cultural Center · Through August 15, 2026 · @angelsgateart
Other LA
same coin — Lou Neyland · induction gallery · Through August 1, 2026 · @induction_gallery
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