Ten Los Angeles Shows Rewriting History This November

Ten exhibitions across Los Angeles this November share one method: digging into history and reframing it through archives, juxtaposition and personal myth. The strongest of them put forgotten institutions and overlooked careers back on the record.

Isabelle Frances McGuire: Joy is a Puppet — Bel Ami, Chinatown, through November 28. McGuire takes on the Salem Witch Trials with a bronze statue, a trio of frogs, an assemblage of baskets and an interactive video game in which the player becomes a woman accused of witchcraft and must decide her next move. The show reads, the gallery suggests, as increasingly relevant — though that claim rests on the viewer's own politics.

April Bey: All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them...They're Worthless — Vielmetter Los Angeles, Downtown, October 31–December 19. Bey's latest chapter in her Atlantica project — in which she writes as an extraterrestrial reporting on human life — presents large-scale woven tapestries in crushed velvet, metallic brocade and sherpa. The portraits come from a 2024 residency in Orange Mound, a historically Black community in Memphis, and depict queer intimacy.

Charles Arnoldi: String Theory — Michael Kohn Gallery, Hollywood, through December 19. Paintings from 2016 to 2019 carry networks of lyrical lines across rectilinear canvases. The work sits in dialogue with Brice Marden and Alexander Calder, after nearly six decades of the artist pushing abstraction from twig constructions to chainsaw-carved plywood.

iris yirei hu: Unconscious Relics — Official Welcome, Westlake, through December 19. Hu layers dreams, Tongva customs and Chinese herbal medicine in new paintings, ceramics and reliquary boxes, building what she calls new mythologies for troubled times.

Milano Chow and Deborah Turbeville — Hollyhock House, through December 20. Chow mined the Los Angeles Public Library archives for early-20th-century images of movie theaters, shops and apartments, constructing fictional facades in graphite, ink and photo transfer. They hang on her own folding screens inside an unfurnished room of Frank Lloyd Wright's house. She also curated The Lifted Veil, Turbeville's surreal photographs from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Yuntao Xu: Estranged Landscape — Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station, Glendale, through January 8, 2027. Reflective fabric, fluffy textiles and colored lights echo Southern California's peaks and valleys with a campy, space-age spin, inside a window-lined former gas station.

Todd Gray: Church and State — The Brick, East Hollywood, through January 16, 2027. The retrospective joins, for the first time, Gray's two careers: his teenage years as a commercial photographer shooting the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, album covers for Gladys Knight and Bobby Brown, and a stint as Michael Jackson's personal photographer — and his post-modern assemblages on colonialism and culture, alongside biographical ephemera from his coming of age as a Black man in 1960s–80s Los Angeles.

The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990 — LACMA, through January 24, 2027. The first large-scale exhibition on LA's first major gallery founded and run by and for Black artists. Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis founded it in 1967, shortly after the Watts Rebellion; it ran in Leimert Park until 1990 and gave early support to David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar and Ulysses Jenkins. Over 60 artworks and archival items trace the history.

Julie Tolentino: And Never Ends — Fulcrum Arts, Pasadena, through January 23, 2027. Tolentino's installation of cultured crystals, an auditory composition and a performance-based drawing aims, in her words, to "decenter the visual" — and it will keep changing over the run.

Reggie Burrows Hodges — three venues, through February 28, 2027. A Theater of Miracles (California African American Museum) pairs his expressionistic paintings with Old Masters, including Jacopo Bassano's "The Miracle of the Quails" (1554). A Theater of Passions (Getty Center) responds to Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. A Theater of Dreams (Art + Practice) revisits his Compton childhood and European travels.

What does this change for Los Angeles viewers? The city's institutions are finally writing the Brockman Gallery and Todd Gray's full career into the record — and with Hodges spanning three venues into February, that correction has a long runway.