The 12 best gallery shows in Los Angeles in October 2026

The show of the season. In 1999, during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ligon gave children pages from Afrocentric coloring books of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with their drawings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, and then translated what the children did with them, the scribbles, the wrong colors, the clown make-up on a hero’s face, into large paintings. The Coloring Book paintings have not been seen together in more than twenty-five years, and this is the largest group assembled since the Walker.

With them is a new work in twenty-two parts, Black Panther Coloring Book #1, based on a 1969 primer whose images Ligon covers in black oil stick, leaving the captions. At Hauser & Wirth’s Arts District complex into January, in the same buildings as Jack Whitten.

More than 130 photographs from the late 1940s to the 1960s, the largest presentation of this body of work since DeCarava first showed it at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983. He set New York street life beside jazz, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Art Blakey caught mid-performance with a handheld 35mm camera, and printed everything himself, in blacks so deep that the pictures seem to come out of the dark. The gallery’s walls are painted navy to match his darkroom.

Curated by Ebony L. Haynes at Zwirner’s Melrose Hill building, through October 31. Next door, at 616 North Western Avenue, a listening room plays the musicians in the photographs all day until October 24. The Brazilian painter Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, in his first California show, shares the building.

New oil paintings and animations by the Los Angeles painter whose bald, hapless men have been one of the funniest and most unsettling inventions in recent art. The new work turns to myths of creation, and to the thin line between making and destroying; a group of “mountain portraits” paints powerful figures as features of the landscape. The centerpiece is Alphabet City, a stop-motion animation of more than twelve minutes, her longest and most complex film to date, in which letters escape their books and build a world by dominating the people in it, with a soundtrack by the artist Nathaniel Mellors.

Through October 24 at Kordansky’s Mid-City compound. In the other gallery, Keith Sonnier’s Inside Light gathers his first neon works, made between 1968 and 1970.

Wray calls his studio “a kind of hothouse where I’m growing paintings,” and these new abstractions, made over two years, look grown rather than designed: thick, earthy, green-toned surfaces, burnished in places and scarred in others, in which a cluster of fine lines from one canvas turns up, changed, in the next. Some set a hard edge, a band or a right angle like a windowsill, against his soft organic forms; in others a single raised shape, like a wax seal or a shell, fills the picture. They hover between abstraction and things half recognized: bones, organs, flowers, land seen from the air.

At Karma in West Hollywood through October 24. Alongside it is the São Paulo painter Felipe Suzuki’s first show with Karma, five luminous still lifes painted from memory. Ann Craven’s moons open on October 29.

Baldessari, who taught half of Los Angeles’s artists and died in 2020, is known for photographs with colored dots over the faces. This show is about the side of him that is least known, the three-dimensional work he made from the mid-1990s to 2018. It restages, for the first time, the pairing he devised in 1997–98 of wallpapers printed with odd objects and large black-and-white photographs hung on top of them, and brings together Beethoven’s Trumpet (with Ear), a giant ear with a horn in it that plays fragments of the late string quartets when you speak into it, a brain under a cloud, an ear-shaped sofa, a camel contemplating a needle and a penguin.

The wit is the same as in the pictures, and so is the seriousness about what an image is. Sprüth Magers opened its Los Angeles gallery with Baldessari ten years ago; this runs through December 19, across Wilshire Boulevard from LACMA.

The first presentation of Lynch’s art in his home city since his death in 2025, and a reminder that he was a photographer and painter before and throughout his life as a filmmaker. Pace shows five series of photographs made between 1979 and 2008: five large color pictures of women’s faces wreathed in smoke, black-and-white nudes, multiple exposures made on a couch, the “Kits”, in which animals are taken apart and laid out like model kits, and views of the buildings of Los Angeles, the city where he made Eraserhead and spent the rest of his life.

LACMA is in the early stages of preparing a Lynch retrospective, which makes this the first look. Through December 23 on South La Brea Avenue, in the building with the permanent James Turrell Skyspace.

Paintings and works on paper from the 1980s, a decade the gallery calls pivotal and still underexamined, a year after Whitten’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. After a studio fire in 1980 he rebuilt his practice around acrylic as a material to be carved and cast: the Soulspace paintings, with arcs and concentric circles carved into thick paint with tools he made himself, and the Site paintings, whose surfaces were cast from manhole covers, tire treads and metal screens. More than a dozen of the Site works on paper are here, with Spiral: A Dedication to R. Bearden, from 1988.

The title comes from Whitten’s idea of a wonder that lives in matter itself. Through January 10 at Hauser & Wirth downtown, alongside Glenn Ligon; the complex is open on Sundays.

Seventeen new photographs. Demand is known for building life-size paper models of real places, photographing them and destroying them; since 2011 he has also photographed other people’s models, and the new pictures are of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maquettes for opera and ballet sets, kept in museum collections in Vienna, Monaco and Munich and shot through a periscope so that the camera stands on the tiny stage: sets for Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Rheingold, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and the ballets of Peter Ludwig Hertel. A few photographs of his own paper constructions, a crowded bookshelf and reeds on a pond, are printed directly onto copper.

The show fills both of Matthew Marks’s West Hollywood spaces, on Orange Grove Avenue and around the corner on Santa Monica Boulevard, through November 7.

Hundley’s seventh exhibition with Regen Projects takes its title from Borges’s story of a book with no first or last page, a fair description of his own method. The Los Angeles artist builds paintings, sculptures and tapestries out of thousands of pinned, glued and stitched fragments, photographs, paper, wire, bone and feathers; one large tapestry here includes pieces of his mother’s wedding veil. It follows his survey at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art last year.

Through October 24 in Hollywood. In the viewing rooms, Silke Otto-Knapp, who was professor of painting at UCLA and died in 2022, is shown in watercolors and the studies behind them, many for the first time.

On May 2, 1986, the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide spent a day in Boyle Heights for the book A Day in the Life of America, with the young members of White Fence, one of the oldest gangs in East Los Angeles. Several of the women she photographed, Rosario, Lisa and Christina, were Deaf, and in the pictures they sign the name of their neighborhood with pride, in their car and with their babies. Iturbide went back many times over the next thirty years; the show keeps to the pictures of that first day, with a group from Tijuana made in 1989–90.

A piece of the city’s own history, by one of Mexico’s great photographers. Through December 5 at ROSEGALLERY, at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.

Six decades of sculpture and assemblage by an artist Los Angeles has taken too long to honor. Dickson, born here in 1947, studied with Charles White at nineteen, worked alongside Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge, and has been artist-in-residence at the Watts Towers since the late 1960s. He carves and builds in wood, metal, bronze, Styrofoam and acrylic, on the body, the African diaspora and what the gallery calls the politics of beauty.

This is his first show with the gallery, and it is well timed: LACMA opens The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990 on October 18, about the Leimert Park gallery where Dickson showed in the 1970s. Through October 31 in Boyle Heights.