This Week in LA: June 25→July 1
In this Edition: The Physics of Light, the Discipline of Water, and a Hundred Years of Silk
This week leans into summer’s long shows — work that rewards return visits more than opening-night urgency — and runs from the archive of a city’s taste to the engineering of its water, from a century of silk to the physics of light. Up in Brentwood, the Getty Research Institute opens Stendahl’s World, the story of the Los Angeles dealer who sold the young city both Pre-Columbian antiquity and European modernism — and in doing so helped teach it what to want. At LACMA, Fashioning Chinese Women traces a hundred years of transformation through more than seventy garments, the cheongsams of Shanghai and Hong Kong giving way to modernity one hemline at a time.
In Hollywood, Lisson Gallery gives Spencer Finch his first Los Angeles exhibition — more than fifty new works on paper gathered around a site-specific skylight and a monumental outdoor sculpture, an art built entirely from the way light arrives and the way memory holds it — while a few blocks over Make Room turns its rooms over to Austin Hayman’s Looking for a Friend, paintings of the artist’s actual friends in the actual rooms they inhabit, a quiet argument against the idea of Los Angeles as a city of surfaces. And downtown, Gallery Luisotti mounts a thirty-year survey of Toshio Shibata, whose large-format photographs of dams, spillways, and poured concrete press the infrastructure that disciplines water into something close to abstraction.
See the full lineup below.
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On View Now
The Getty Center | Brentwood, Los Angeles
Stendahl’s World: Marketing Ancient Mexico and Modern Art in Los Angeles
On view through October 18, 2026
@gettymuseum
At the Getty Research Institute, Stendahl’s World reconstructs the career of the Stendahl Galleries — the Los Angeles dealership that, across the middle decades of the twentieth century, sold the young city both Pre-Columbian antiquities and European modern art, often in the same breath. Drawing on the GRI’s archive of correspondence, photographs, catalogues, and objects, the exhibition follows how a single ambitious dealer shaped West Coast taste, moving Aztec and Maya works alongside Picasso and Diego Rivera and helping invent the very idea of Los Angeles as a place where ancient Mexico and the modernist avant-garde might hang on the same wall. It is a portrait of a salesman, and through him, of how a city learns what to collect.
LACMA | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity
On view through October 25, 2026
@lacma
LACMA traces a hundred years of transformation through clothing in Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity, gathering more than seventy garments and ensembles — among them the cheongsams of Shanghai and Hong Kong whose narrowing silhouettes and shifting cuts register the century’s upheavals as precisely as any written document. Moving from the late imperial period into the modern era, the exhibition reads dress as social history, the female body and what covered it becoming a site where tradition, commerce, colonialism, and emancipation were continuously renegotiated. It is a show about textiles that turns out to be a show about how a culture remade itself, one seam and hemline at a time.
Lisson Gallery | Hollywood, Los Angeles
Spencer Finch: Balboa of House and Garden
June 26 – August 22, 2026
@lisson_gallery
For his first exhibition in Los Angeles, Spencer Finch fills Lisson’s Hollywood space with more than fifty new works on paper, a site-specific skylight installation, and a monumental outdoor sculpture — an art that has always taken light itself as both subject and medium. Balboa of House and Garden extends his decades-long inquiry into perception and memory: the way a particular quality of afternoon light, or the color of a half-remembered sky, can be measured, transcribed, and set down on paper without ever quite being pinned in place. Finch works at the seam where optical science meets feeling, and the result is less a record of what a place looks like than of what it felt like to stand there and pay attention.
Make Room | Hollywood, Los Angeles
Looking for a Friend
June 27 – August 1, 2026
@makeroom.la
Make Room gives Austin Hayman his debut solo presentation with Looking for a Friend, a suite of paintings built not from landmark occasions but from the unremarkable and the repeated — the sheets of a first apartment, a Monday walk taken the same way week after week, the hour light reliably reaches a window. Hayman paints his actual friends in the rooms they actually inhabit, surrounded by the objects that belong to them, each figure carrying the particular warmth of being seen and known. Against the city’s reputation as a place of surfaces and strategic encounters, the show makes its argument quietly and from the inside out: that Los Angeles is finally defined by the people you meet and the ordinary afternoons you spend with them.
Gallery Luisotti | DTLA
Toshio Shibata: Concrete Poetry
On view through July 25, 2026
@galleryluisotti
Gallery Luisotti gathers more than thirty years of Toshio Shibata’s photographs into Concrete Poetry, a survey of the Japanese photographer’s lifelong attention to the places where engineering meets terrain — dams, spillways, weirs, and the poured-concrete channels built to discipline water as it moves through mountains. Shooting in large format and often from above, Shibata flattens these vast civil structures into nearly abstract fields of pattern and tone, the rush of a spillway reduced to silvered geometry, the hillside behind it pressed into the same plane. The title is exact: this is infrastructure rendered as composition, the unlovely machinery of flood control turned formal, still, and strangely lyrical.
Also On View
Bergamot Station
A Friendship Story — Nieves González · Richard Heller Gallery · Through July 25, 2026
@richardhellergalleryUnfolding — Claire B. Cotts · Nüart Gallery · Through July 11, 2026 · @nuartgallery
Hollywood
Joseph Jones — Overduin & Co. · Through August 1, 2026
@overduinandco
Mid-Wilshire
POV (Point of View) — Group Show · Korean Cultural Center & Launch LA · Through July 17, 2026
@launch_la / @kccla
DTLA
Swollen with Life — Group Show · LA Artcore · June 26 – July 12, 2026 · @laartcore
Keep Forever — Kash Ford · de boer · June 26 – August 29, 2026
@deboergalleryComing Home: A Gathering of Voices — Evita Tezeno · Luis De Jesus Los Angeles · Through August 15, 2026
@luisdejesuslosangeles
Chinatown
Lo Cotidiano — Curated by Joaquin Trujillo · Eastern Projects Gallery · June 27 – July 18, 2026
@eastern_projects_gallery
Pasadena
This Land Is ... — The Huntington · Through January 11, 2027 · @thehuntingtonlibrary
Brentwood
Lost. Found. Returned. — Getty Research Institute · The Getty Center · Through October 18, 2026
@gettymuseum
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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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