The Best Art Shows to See Outside the Fairs

While Frieze Los Angeles, Felix and Spring/Break Art Show will certainly be the draw of the international collecting crowd descending upon the city for L.A. Art Week (Feb. 26 to March 3), there are plenty of local artists, galleries and events taking place outside an overcrowded tent or booth that are equally worthy of attention.

THR rounded up some of our favorite art happenings in and around the city — from two psychedelic painters turning their visions into wearable art to a group of Mexican-American artists taking over Jeffrey Deitch Gallery — so you’ll have other nice things to look at when you leave the Frieze VIP section.

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Jeremy Shockley at Saint Laurent 

At the 2022 gala of the Flea-founded Silverlake Conservatory of Music Benefit auction, Saint Laurent’s Farrah Katina, who specializes in public relations and collaborations, fell in love with a painting by Jeremy Shockley. A year later, Katina was busy organizing the South Carolina-born artist’s magical realist works — think paintings of sunsets and galaxies that appears to be torn open into happy faces — into a solo presentation (Feb. 27 to March 31) at the French brand’s Beverly Hills boutique as part of its Rive Droite collaboration program.

“It’s basically some of my favorite pieces from the past two years,” says Shockley, referring to paintings from recents solo shows at The Hole in New York and One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, a residency at Moosey in England, and an installation at the 2022 Spring/Break Art Show.

In addition to the exhibition, Shockley is working with Saint Laurent on a capsule of limited-edition clothing and accessories. “I’m just a painter, but it’s nice to see the folks at Saint Laurent turn my wild work into high fashion.” 326 North Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills

The New Gallucci Tull in Topanga

When L.A.-based artist Dani Tull, who was a partner in the artist-run space Odd Ark for years, began dating Jessica Gallucci, an artist liaison at The Hole art gallery, the two bonded over “exploring the physical and spiritual fringes of Los Angeles, its overlooked histories and artists,” says Tull. Now, the two are launching their own space, Gallucci Tull, in a geodesic dome at Tull’s Encina Artist Residency in Topanga Canyon.

First up is the exhibition Nick Taggart: Art School Portraits from 1974, running Feb. 26 to March 4. “It’s interesting for me looking back at these fifty years later,” says Taggart, who landed in LA in 1977 and went on to make album covers for Van Halen and Richard Pryor (who kept the original portrait, done in the same style as Taggart’s art school drawings, for his personal collection) while making paintings of the original Spago scene, Children of a Lesser God director Randa Haines, the storefront of the cult boutique Heaven, and countless other L.A. icons of yore.

“I didn’t think I’d found my true voice until later, but now I see these drawings as quite sophisticated,” says Taggart. “I made all my art school friends look like movie stars.” 21658 Encina Road, Topanga

Scratching at the Moon at ICA LA

During the summer of 2020, a group of Asian American artists started a collective over Zoom called the AAPI Arts Network that hosted discussions about representation, visibility and anti-Asian violence happening during the pandemic. Now, one of the members, sculptor and UCLA professor Anna Sew Hoy, has co-curated a monumental, years-in-the-making multimedia survey, Scratching at the Moon, at ICA LA, with the museum’s director Anne Ellegood.

The show, on view through May 12, teases out many of those AAPI Arts Network dialogues with film, sculpture, installation and photography from 13 SoCal artists spanning the entirety of the museum (and even the shop, which is taken over by the Ooga Booga art bookstore).

Highlights include Bruce Yonemoto’s 1999 three-channel video Hanabi Fireworks, which morphs pyrotechnics into the logos of film studios as a way to examine Hollywood’s depiction of Asian lives; Yong Soon Min’s 1992 photos, which show her body tattooed with places of conflict (from the DMZ to the LA Riots); and a 40-foot-long room divider Sew Hoy fashioned from the seams of button-down shirts. “This show became really big because when we were working on it we realized there had never been a museum show in L.A. of all Asian-American artists in a contemporary museum,” says Sew Hoy, noting the title was a nod to the “high aspirations that immigrant parents have for their kids … and the striving towards reaching that moon.”

Adds CAA agent and art collector Thao Nguyen, who recently visited the exhibition, “Scratching at the Moon is a beautiful historic show. It’s the first institutional survey of underrepresented Asian American artists based in and around L.A. and brings to light the diversity of the Asian American experience.” 1717 E. 7th St., DTLA

Alake Shilling Drops Paper Planes

If you mixed disco, psychedelia, California funk art, pop, African sculpture, Disney characters, Care Bears and lots of mushrooms, and translated them into glitter-bombed paintings and meaty ceramic sculptures of this tripped-out world, you could start to understand the oeuvre (and appeal) of Alake Shilling.

In the past five years, this L.A.-born multihyphenate has been the subject of two solo shows at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (in New York and Los Angeles); placed work in the permanent collections of the Hammer and Rubell museums; collaborated with Marc Jacobs, Marni and the LAFC; and debuted her first museum survey, Outburst, at the Palm Springs Art Museum (PSAM), through Aug. 5.

She also dropping a new collab — featuring a hoodie adorned with a patch version of her Big Bossy Bear sculpture, which is up now at PSAm — with Paper Planes, the Jay-Z-owned streetwear brand.

“I love concert tees and things that commemorate a special moment,” says Shilling. “I’ve always really wanted to have something special come out with the opening of a show, but it never worked out until now.” 101 N. Museum Drive, Palm Springs

One Trick Pony Goes to Melrose Hill

After a quarter century working as an art critic and screenwriter (Plush, The Gallerina), Arty Nelson threw his hat into the curatorial world in 2021 with One Trick Pony, a pint-size storefront gallery in the heart of Little Ethiopia. “I felt like it was an extension of art writing,” says Nelson, who has staged notable shows with Alex Becerra, Dinos Chapman and Al Freeman and many other emerging and established talents over the past two years.

During L.A. Art Week, Nelson is set to debut a new space (featuring a hand-painted sign by Aaron Rose) located just south of the 101 Freeway on Western Avenue. “I want to get out of that template of only staging single artist shows to do a few more micro-surveys with a more historical bent,” says Nelson, who is launching the space with the show New Abstraction: 6 Proposals (March 1 to 30) featuring abstract works by Richard Tinkler, Se Oh, Mary Gortani, Iris Estes, Julia Bennett and Chris Jin Kim.

Nelson says he’s excited about his new location amid the burgeoning Melrose Hill arts district on Western: “With us opening there will be a dozen spots on that half-mile corridor between Lexington and Melrose and it’ll be fun to watch what becomes of it from my new perch.” 1187 North Western Ave., Hollywood

The Pit Moves to Atwater

In 2014, artist couple Adam Miller and Devon Oder took over a mechanic’s garage in Glendale, complete with an oil change pit, to create a curatorial platform for themselves. “We weren’t trying to be a commercial gallery, so we named it The Pit because it didn’t sound so serious; it could have been a punk club,” says Miller. Over a decade, however, The Pit has become a very serious operation, opening a second space in Palm Springs and now representing 25 artists, whom they’ve placed in some of the top collections in Los Angeles and abroad.

Now the couple is leveling up again, leaving Glendale for a 12,500-square-foot space in Atwater Village with three galleries and a shop purveying books and editions. It opens Feb. 24 with a two-person drawing show from longtime collaborators Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman and a massive group show, Halfway to Sanity, featuring 50 artists who’ve shown at The Pit over the years. “A big part of this expansion is to be able to work with more historical and institutional artists on more substantial projects,” says Miller. “We want to show the emerging and mid-career artists with the artists who inspired them.” 3015 Dolores St., Atwater Village

At the Edge of the Sun at Jeffrey Deitch

After his opening of Shattered Glass — the landmark 2021 group show in Hollywood of emerging BIPOC artists curated by Melahn Frierson and AJ Girard — Jeffrey Deitch made a number of visits to a group of Southern California-based Mexican-American artists featured in the show (like ceramic sculptor Diana Yesenia Alvarado, painter Mario Ayala, and the multimedia and performance artist Rafa Esparza).

“I’ve always looked for communities of artists rather than individual talents,” says Deitch, who just staged a Wild Style show celebrating the 40th anniversary of the film that captured the downtown New York street scene surrounding Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. While that show was important, his next, At the Edge of the Sun — featuring landmark works (including a replicated truck stop) from this group of 12 artist friends who’ve bonded over neighborhood pride, graffiti and lowrider culture, and a nightlife scene they are leading — will be “the most important show I’ll put on in L.A. since Shattered Glass,” says Deitch. “For me, this group is the most exciting thing going on in contemporary art in America right now.” The show runs Feb. 24 to May 4. 925 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood

Terry Allen takes Frieze and Hollywood Forever

Depending upon your point of reference, most people know Terry Allen as the west Texas musician behind the conceptual outlaw country albums Juarez and Lubbock, or as the polymath multimedia artist who attended the Chouinard Art Institute and palled around with the Cool School. “I don’t really separate the two, never have,” says Allen, who will don both hats during L.A. Art Week. The Santa Fe-based artist will have a solo booth Frieze Los Angeles with LA Louver featuring six decades worth of works on paper, sculpture, mixed media work, and a compilation of videos (including his theatrical piece “The Embrace”).

The two nights before Frieze — Feb. 28 and 29 — Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band will give a special performance of music relating to the works in the exhibitions (and some iconic albums) at the Masonic Lodge of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. “It’s the first time we’ve played a cemetery gig so we’re calling it Music Beyond the Grave!” says Allen, who just released a songbook from Juarez lyrics with etchings made to relate to the songs. “I’m looking forward to it. We’ll play some songs about Houdini and the afterlife. Why not?”

Valie Export embodies MAK Center

When the Austrian performance artist Waltraud Hollinger introduced herself in the late sixties to the Vienna Actionists as Valie Export, she quickly gained notoriety for the feminist performances Tap and Touch Cinema, for which she invited strangers in the shopping district of Vienna to touch her breasts through a cardboard cinema stage, and ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic. For the latter she walked into an art house cinema in Munich wearing a biker jacket and crotchless chaps, her hair teased out like Mötley Crüe. To memorialize her new persona she made a series of wheatpaste posters in her Action Pants ensemble, exposing herself in an alley while brandishing a machine gun. She followed these radical feminist gestures with a series of Body Configurations photos of herself insinuating her sometimes clothed body over public spaces.

Those seminal photos and two videos — Adjunct Dislocations (1973) and Syntagma (1984) — exploring the expanded cinema through body movement and the doppelgänger will open at the MAK Center during L.A. Art Week (running Feb. 28 through April 7). As the artist once said, “You have to go against some of the rules of the state that suppresses people’s liberties.” In a post-Roe world, Export’s actions are perhaps more relevant than ever. 835 Kings Rd., West Hollywood

Coffee Time With Terence Koh at Make Room

As part of its new Room Project Space, the Hollywood gallery Make Room Los Angeles will open a speakeasy/coffee shop with the now L.A.-based multimedia provocateur Terence Koh, who has done everything from gold leaf his own shit to operate and harvest a “bee chapel” within the confines of art spaces over the past two decades.

At Make Room, Koh will give two performances — on Tuesday, Feb. 27th and Saturday, March 2nd — where the artist will invite visitors to drink homemade coffee with him and engage with a cave-like structure that will have its own soil floor.

“Terence is very interested in ritual and community,” says Make Room owner Emilia Yin. “So turning our gallery into a coffee shop is a perfect venue for that. And during a certain hour of the day there will be a really special light coming into the exhibition that he wants people to encounter.” 6361 Waring Ave., Hollywood

A version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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