Nine Unmissable Museum Shows During Frieze Los Angeles 2026

Frieze Los Angeles returns to Santa Monica Airport 26 February – 1 March 2026 and, as usual, alongside the 100+ galleries taking part there is a welter of outstanding institutional shows across the city coinciding with Frieze Week. The 2025 edition of Hammer Museum’s ‘Made in LA’ is once again curated by Essence Harden, who also directs the Focus section at the fair, and here are nine more exhibitions to see in February. 

‘Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985’ | Getty Center | 24 Feb – 14 Jun 2026

The symbolic values of black and white and colour have never felt more charged than in the mid-20th-century US, where the photography’s growing acceptance as a bona fide art form was attended by its media use as a tool of stereotyping what Black America looked like, often – to use another photographic term – ‘negatively’. This show at the Getty Center presents 150 works by African American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora artists who, over three decades, strove to expand both social boundaries and the scope of photography. It includes artists who document the Black experience, such as Roy de Carava and Gordon Parks, and those who use the medium to investigate how Black identity itself is visually conceived, including Ming Smith, Carrie Mae Weems and the lesser-known photographic works by Barkley L Hendricks.

‘The Eight Directions of the Wind: Edmund de Waal’ | The Huntington | 18 October 2025 – 26 October 2026

The former California residence of Henry E. and Arabella Huntington is today home to the huge collection of artworks, books and objets d’art they amassed, much of them acquired in the aftermath of WWI. Into these hallowed halls, English artist and ceramicist Edmund de Waal has made three site-specific installations for the Huntington’s Art Gallery (‘on sanctuary’), Chinese Garden (‘on porcelain’) and the Japanese Marsh Tea House (‘on shadows’). As he describes in his 2010 book The Hare with Amber Eyes, De Waal’s own European Jewish family were subjected to Nazi persecution and stripped of their possessions, so by presenting works such as an installation of Meissen plates looted by the Nazis, damaged during the bombing of Dresden and subsequently mended by kintsugi method, de Waal’s interventions carry a tragic and bloody personal dimension.

‘Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes’ | ICA Los Angeles | 11 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

In Chile, the volcano is a symbol of sacred power, and it repeatedly occurs in the work of Chile-born artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra as a totem of the country from which she was exiled and a vision of the dormant power of the human body. For four decades, Vásquez de la Horra has engaged with themes of mortality, trauma, ritual and ecology, mainly through drawing – from lush vegetal explosions eliding humans and plants, to Yellow Submarine-style psychedelia, to obsessive cartographies reminiscent of outsider art. Having survived the Pinochet regime, Vásquez de la Horra emigrated to Germany in the mid-1990s, studying with Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Troeckel, and discovering the Afro-Cuban tradition of Santería. Following her inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale, ‘The Awake Volcanoes’ is her first solo exhibition in the US and a powerful introduction to her singular cosmology.

‘Robert Therrien: This Is a Story’ | The Broad | 22 November 2025 – 5 April 2026

Like the giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, the oversized works of the late LA artist Robert Therrien are both delightful and terrifying. His towering recreations of everyday objects – folding chairs, kitchen tables, stacks of pans – have a subtle monumentality: they’re just there, forcing the viewer to accommodate their otherness with an uncanny thrill of relinquished control. The largest museum exhibition to date dedicated to Therrien is a chance to encounter his most iconic works in full effect, and explore his range. There are undersized pans, too, a cupboard containing only red objects and a cloud of analogue telephones, their curly flexes entangled in a seething mass. It is as if by fixing on one dimension of a thing and emphasizing or distorting it, Therrien is calling into question the thing itself.

‘Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began’ | LACMA | 12 October 2025 – 29 March 2026

Given the cinematic quality of much of his work, it’s surprising that ‘The Day Tomorrow Began’ is Tavares Strachan’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles. Strachan’s works are often productions – ambitious and polished – and here he presents rooms of rice grass surrounding the totemic figures of Rita Marley, Nina Simone and Andrea Crabtree (the first Black female deep-sea diver in the US army), and a 2,500-page Encyclopedia of Invisibility, which documents the unsung Black pioneers of science and exploration. Strachan’s allusive art is packed with ideas, visual metaphors and unexpected conjunctions and, like the title of this show, feels like history crashing in waves on to the shore of the present, one after another.

‘JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA’ | Marciano Art Foundation | 25 October 2025 – 25 April 2026

John Giorno was so clearly a person in the right place at the right time that the rollcall of those he was associated with (William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol…) can threaten to occlude his own achievement. But, as the title of this exhibition at Marciano Art Foundation suggests, to be fixated on the past can be to become fixed in the past. Right up to his death in 2019, Giorno rebelled against the establishment, from his democratizing Dial-a-Poem project (1968–), which allowed anyone to phone a number and hear a poem, 24 hours a day, to his AIDS Treatment Project, which provided rent, food and medicine for those ignored by the government. Co-curated by Marciano’s Hanneke Skerath and the critic and writer Carlos Valladares, this exhibition puts special emphasis on Giorno’s visual practice, with text paintings, early prints and his late rainbow canvases, all informed by the same gallows humour as his poetry. With special loans from Giorno’s archive, the show is a mordant reminder of how prescient his voice is, and how little what he rails against has changed in the last 60-odd years.

‘Material Curiosity by Design: Evelyn & Jerome Ackerman’ | Craft Contemporary | 15 November 2025 – 10 May 2026

A priority for design lovers, this show is a joyful exploration of mid-century Californian tastemakers Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman, who left the smokestacks of Detroit for Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Their LA studio successfully married influences from European modernism, folk art and traditions from Asia to create an identifiable Californian aesthetic that was still accessible to a mass-market audience. Selections from mosaics, wall hangings and pieces in ceramic and wood produced over the duo’s 50-year career will be on display, along with preparatory sketches and samples – in dialogue with new works by contemporary artists Porfirio Gutiérrez, Jolie Ngo and Vince Skelly. A conversation about materials, landscape and craft that feels very California.

‘Giving you the best that I got’ | Art + Practice | 11 October 2025 – 7 March 2026

While the maternal bond is a perennial theme in global art history, portrayals of Black motherhood are less prevalent in contemporary art. ‘Giving you the best that I got’ seeks to redress this by focusing on images and narratives of Black mothers in the US. Part of a five-year collaboration between Art + Practice and the California African American Museum (CAAM), curator Dominique Clayton assembles works by the likes of Derrick Adams, Karon Davis, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Calida Rawles, Harmonia Rosales and Kwame Brathwaite, a pioneer of the ‘Black is beautiful’ movement.

‘What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem’ | Variety Arts Theater | 6 February – 20 March 2026

One of the world’s most important collections of time-based art, the Berlin-based Julia Stoschek Foundation opens its first presentation in the US just in time for Frieze Los Angeles. The venue is the mock-Venetian splendour of Downtown’s Variety Arts Theater, where curator Udo Kittelman’s ‘audiovisual poem’ seeks to dissolve ‘the boundaries between white cube and black box’, per the press release. It features a starry cast of cinematic pioneers and moving-image artists, mixing Doug Aitken and Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren and P. Staff, Arthur Jafa and Walt Disney, thus ‘bringing silent cinema and time-based art together in a city defined by film’.

Further Information

Frieze Los Angeles 2026, 26 February – 1 March 2026, Santa Monica Airport. 

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_{Main image: Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, ‘The Awake Volcanoes’ (installation view), ICA Los Angeles, 2025. Courtesy: ICA Los Angeles}