This Week in LA: July 9→15
In this Edition: Ed Moses at 100, Willie Birch's First Retrospective, and Summer Openings Across Los Angeles
This week looks in two directions at once. Two institutions turn to the long view: at William Turner Gallery, MOSES@100 marks the centennial of Ed Moses, the Ferus-era dean of Los Angeles abstraction who treated the canvas as a laboratory he never stopped rebuilding — cracked, dragged, resurfaced, refusing to settle into a signature; and across town at the California African American Museum, Stories to Tell gathers the first career retrospective of Willie Birch, nearly six decades of painting, papier-mâché sculpture, and monumental works on paper built around his idea of “retentions” — the way African traditions persist within Black American life.
Then, on Saturday, July 11, the galleries answer with a night of openings — a rolling reception from Bergamot Station to Chinatown. At David Kordansky, the Korean painter Moka Lee makes her US solo debut with Persona Works, portraits polished to a cool, near-photographic sheen that keeps sliding toward mask; downtown at Vielmetter, Esther Pearl Watson’s Celestial Road Trip maps the flora, fauna, and roadside strangeness of her Joshua Tree life, where the desert and the cosmic share a single horizon; and up in Hollywood, Wilding Cran gives Michael John Kelly’s NOTHING four canvases where broad brushwork is fractured and reassembled through pigment-print collage, the digital folded back into paint until abstraction hardens into something like an object.
The full lineup is below.
On View Now
William Turner Gallery | Bergamot Station, Santa Monica
Ed Moses: MOSES@100
July 11 – September 5, 2026
@williamturnergallery
William Turner Gallery marks the centennial of Ed Moses — Ferus Gallery veteran, restless dean of Los Angeles abstraction — with MOSES@100, a survey drawn across the six decades in which he treated the canvas as a laboratory rather than a destination, cracking, layering, dragging, and resurfacing paint until the picture became a record of its own making. Moses never settled into a signature, and the exhibition follows that refusal — grids dissolving into gesture, resin and pigment worried into geologic strata, the hand always testing what a surface can be made to hold. Mounted nearly a decade after his death and staged alongside son Andy Moses’s own light-driven abstractions, the show reads as a city taking the measure of a painter who helped teach it how to look.
California African American Museum | Exposition Park, Los Angeles
Willie Birch: Stories to Tell
On view through October 21, 2026
@caaminla
The California African American Museum mounts the first career retrospective of Willie Birch, Stories to Tell, tracing nearly six decades of a New Orleans-born artist who has moved from early figurative painting through 1980s papier-mâché sculpture to the large-scale charcoal-and-acrylic works on paper that anchor his recent practice. Organized chronologically, the exhibition turns on Birch’s idea of “retentions” — the ways African traditions persist within Black American music, art, and daily life — and traces that persistence across changes in material as much as subject. Across the galleries the work asks why some cultural memories are kept and others let go, unearthing uncomfortable truths about American identity while holding open the possibility of a more expansive account of the stories we tell.
David Kordansky Gallery | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Moka Lee: Persona Works
July 10 – August 22, 2026
@davidkordanskygallery
In Persona Works, her first US solo exhibition, the South Korean painter Moka Lee treats the face as something assembled for viewing — portraits whose cool, near-photographic polish keeps sliding toward mask, the sitter culled from strangers’ social feeds and reassessed as aesthetic data. Lee builds each surface from a gesso underpainting scored and layered one translucent color at a time, a laminate finish that echoes the pass-by-pass logic of CMYK printing even as it registers the psychological strata her subjects try to conceal. Between the triviality of a selfie and the monumentality of oil paint, Persona Works stages the muddling of person and persona — beautiful, unnerving, and quietly suspicious of its own polish.
Vielmetter Los Angeles | DTLA
Esther Pearl Watson: Celestial Road Trip
July 11 – August 21, 2026
@vielmetter
Esther Pearl Watson returns to Vielmetter for Celestial Road Trip, a fourth solo built from new paintings and works on paper that map the flora, fauna, and roadside strangeness of her high-desert life around Joshua Tree. Watson works in a folk-narrative register thick with incident — hand-lettered signs, metallic skies, the odd hovering craft — where the everyday desert and the cosmic share a horizon line and neither takes precedence. The pictures read as travelogue and diary at once, tender and faintly deadpan, finding in the scrubland outside the studio door a whole cosmology of small wonders.
Wilding Cran Gallery | Hollywood, Los Angeles
Michael John Kelly: NOTHING
July 11 – August 1, 2026
@wildingcrangallery
Wilding Cran gives Michael John Kelly the room for NOTHING, four large canvases in which oil and acrylic are fractured by broad brushwork and then reassembled through pigment-print collage — the digital process folded back into paint until the two become indistinguishable. Kelly builds abstractions that behave like objects, imagined forms with a stubborn physical presence, drawing in equal measure on science fiction, the history of painting, and the post-punk wall of sound. What emerges is a post-human landscape traced in fragments, the sublime located improbably in the seams where the handmade and the machine-made meet.
Also On View
Bergamot Station
Valle Oscuro / Dark Valley — Adrián Arguedas Ruano · Craig Krull Gallery · July 11 – August 29, 2026 · @craigkrullgallery
Manhattan Beach
Ink Reborn — 7 Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Ink — Group Show · Bluerider ART · July 11 – September 5, 2026 · @blueriderarttpsh
Midsummer — Group Show · Diversions Fine Arts · Through July 26, 2026 · @diversionsfinearts
Mid-Wilshire
Tom’s Stretch — Tom of Finland · David Kordansky Gallery · July 10 – August 22, 2026 · @davidkordanskygallery
Imaginary Windows — Mucki Botkay · Anat Ebgi · July 11 – August 22, 2026 · @anatebgigallery
Hollywood
Quiet Rules — Group Show · Moskowitz Bayse · July 11 – August 22, 2026 · @moskowitzbayse
The Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine — Molly Larkey & Caitlin Lonegan · OCHI · July 11 – August 22, 2026 · @ochigallery
Chinatown
Folded Memories — Estefania Ajcip · Charlie James Gallery · July 10 – August 22, 2026 · @charliejamesgallery
DTLA
Ketchup & Mustard — Evan Trine · Vielmetter Los Angeles · July 11 – August 29, 2026 · @vielmetter
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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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