This week runs from a South L.A. gallery that launched a generation of careers to a set of stolen masterpieces remade in clay, with a photographer’s archive and two artists’ takes on what women are told to be in between. On Saturday at LAUNCH LA on La Brea, Cindy Craig opens Weeping Women, paintings and mixed media on beauty, desire, and the cost of being seen, beside Leigh Salgado’s Small Eruptions, hand-cut paper boxes that hold back pressure before the burst. The same day, Make Room opens Raina Lee’s Stolen, where every piece is a stoneware copy of a work that was taken — a Vermeer and a Manet still missing from the Gardner, a crown cast in pewter and glass after the Louvre theft.
On Sunday, The Brick on Western Avenue opens Todd Gray: Church and State, two new mural-scale photographic assemblages that set European palaces and churches against West African sites of the slave trade, shown with the biographical material behind Gray’s two careers as a commercial photographer and as an artist. The same afternoon, LACMA opens The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990, the first large-scale exhibition on the space brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis founded in South L.A. after the Watts Rebellion, where David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, and Carrie Mae Weems got early starts. Also on view: Himalayan art in Pasadena, the visual culture of the Black Panther Party in Riverside, two studio neighbors in Long Beach, and four stoneware bells on Catalina.
See the full lineup below.
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Featured Exhibitions
LACMA | Mid-Wilshire
The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990
October 18, 2026 – January 24, 2027
@lacma
Brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis founded the Brockman Gallery in South L.A. in the wake of the Watts Rebellion, and for more than two decades it was a vital space for young artists of color, nurturing the early careers of David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. LACMA’s survey, the first large-scale exhibition on the gallery’s impact, brings together more than 60 works across media, all with ties to the Davises’ community-minded project, with rich archival material. It traces how the brothers made room for artistic experiment, intellectual exchange, and a multicultural community. On view in BCAM, Level 1.
LAUNCH LA | Mid-Wilshire
Cindy Craig: Weeping Women / Leigh Salgado: Small Eruptions
October 17 – November 14, 2026
@launch_la
LAUNCH pairs two solo shows by Los Angeles artists who look at femininity and the roles women are pressed to play, in ornate, symbolic, funny, and sometimes dark work. Cindy Craig’s Weeping Women uses paintings and mixed media, surreal imagery and advertising-style ornament to ask what it means to be a woman in a society that never stops telling her how she should look. Leigh Salgado’s Small Eruptions turns to her signature hand-cut and painted paper: vibrant wall boxes burst with frilly hand-painted paper beside small, tightly contained cut-paper paintings, each one holding pressure just before release. The opening is Saturday, October 17, from 6 to 9pm; a closing reception and artist-led walkthrough follow on November 14.
Make Room | Hollywood
Raina Lee: Stolen
October 17 – December 5, 2026
@makeroom.la
Every piece in Stolen is a copy, and every original was stolen. Raina Lee went to the Louvre in October 2025 to see the French crown jewels and found the gallery shut days after the theft, so she made her own — a sapphire crown and an emerald necklace with settings cast in pewter and stones cast in glass. From there she worked back through the record of missing art, from the thirteen works taken from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, among them Vermeer’s The Concert and Manet’s Chez Tortoni, to the paintings lifted from the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 2012. The pictures are glazed and fired stoneware slabs, made to read as both paintings and postcards. The opening reception is Saturday, October 17.
The Brick | Hollywood
Todd Gray: Church and State
October 18, 2026 – January 16, 2027
@thebrick_la
Over the past decade, Los Angeles-born Todd Gray (b. 1954) has built ever larger photographic assemblages from his own archive, setting palaces, museums, and churches of European wealth against sites tied to the slave trade on Africa’s west coast, and threading in photographs of African American cultural icons. Church and State shows three works, two of them new and mural-scale, with a substantial collection of biographical images and ephemera tracing Gray’s life as a young Black man in post-war Los Angeles and the two bodies of work, commercial photography and art, that he kept apart for years. Organized by The Brick’s director Hamza Walker with Hannah Burstein and Storm Bookhard, it comes with a forthcoming book-length interview between Gray and Walker. The opening reception is Sunday, October 18, from 2 to 5pm.
Also On View
Hollywood
Cinematic Glamour — Fabian Perez · Fabian Perez Gallery — October 17, 2026 – January 2, 2027 · @fabianperezgallery
West Hollywood
July Guzman and Sol Summers: Imago — albertz benda — October 1 – November 6, 2026 · @albertzbenda
Chinatown
Macabre — curated by Albert Reyes · Eastern Projects Gallery — Through November 7, 2026 · @eastern_projects_gallery
DTLA
A Room for Different Worlds — 24 artists · Aabee Bleue Project — October 17 – November 8, 2026 · @aabeebleueproject
Culver City
Figure & Form — K&K Gallery — October 3 – November 14, 2026 · @kkgalleryla
Pasadena
We Are Connected: Highlights from the USC Pacific Asia Museum Himalayan Collection — USC Pacific Asia Museum — October 17, 2026 – May 2, 2027 · @usc_pam
Long Beach
Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. — Long Beach Museum of Art — October 16, 2026 – February 28, 2027 · @lbmaorg
Riverside
Power to the People: The Revolutionary Art & Vision of the Black Panther Party — Riverside Art Museum — October 17, 2026 – April 11, 2027 · @riversideartmuseum
Catalina Island
Amelia Lockwood: Bells — Catalina Museum for Art & History — October 17, 2026 – April 4, 2027 · @catalinamuseum
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