Michele StuevenThe Japanese American National Museum will reopen its newly renovated Pavilion next to the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Jan. 23, 2027.
The transformed Pavilion includes new first-floor galleries for the all-new core exhibition, In the Future We Call Now: Realities of Racism, Forging Democracy; improved special exhibition galleries on the second floor with the inaugural exhibition, Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo; a new and publicly accessible Hirasaki National Resource Center featuring art and design from the permanent collection, the interactive StoryFiles of George Takei and others, and archival viewing areas.
The Kosasa Education Center will have two new classrooms, an improved visitor entry experience, and an upgraded HVAC system to preserve JANM’s significant collection of more than 160,000 artifacts. JANM’s Pavilion has been closed since January 6, 2025.
Rendering courtesy of the Japanese American National Museum
Jonathan Ryan’s upcoming solo presentation, The Hour of the Pearl at Megan Mulrooney Gallery, opens on Saturday, Sept. 12 and will be on view through Saturday, Oct. 24.
Ryan began as an observational painter, working en plein air along the Mississippi River, but after moving to Los Angeles, observation gave way to invention. In more recent years, Ryan began working sand and pulverized granite directly into the paint, giving his surfaces a physical connection to the earth forms they depict.
Alongside this development, he has drawn from the vernacular of 1980s Atari games and their radically reduced environments, where a handful of pixels can conjure a horizon, ruin, passageway, or entire world. Landscape and architecture became imagined rather than recorded, as Ryan began constructing worlds that seem to slip between past and future, the earthly and the otherworldly.
Taken from John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row, the “hour of the pearl” describes the fleeting interval between night and morning when time stops and examines itself. Ryan’s landscapes occupy a similarly ambiguous register, using imagined worlds and a sci-fi vocabulary to bend perception and open up space for contemplation, curiosity, and wonder.
The Hour of the Pearl (Courtesy of the artist, Jonathan Ryan)
While the visual language of early video games provided a stepping stone into these imagined environments, Ryan has increasingly turned toward German Romanticism and the tradition of spiritual landscape painting. Several works in The Hour of the Pearl take abandoned cathedrals and abbeys as points of departure, transforming their architecture into strange, speculative ruins. I
ICYMI, SEGA and iam8bit are celebrating 35 years of Sonic the Hedgehog with 35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit, featuring original works from more than 30 renowned artists. The exhibitions pay homage to Sonic’s journey throughout the years. The show comes to Los Angeles at ARK/8 on Saturday, Sept. 26, and Sunday, Sept. 27. RSVP for free here.
The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery will present Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck, the first major survey of the work of the LA-based artist, from Thursday, Sept. 3 through Sunday, Nov. 22. The exhibition is curated by Andy Campbell. An opening reception will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 10 starting at 6 p.m.
Comprising more than 150 works, including participatory and multimedia installations, photographic, video, and audio works, early graphic pieces, and textual interventions, the exhibition highlights Silton as a key figure in West Coast conceptual, feminist, and queer genealogies of art and design.
Making its debut alongside the exhibition is Civilized Voices, a site-specific public project inspired by a series of billboards erected by Aline Barnsdall at Barnsdall Park in the 1940s. As an homage to Barnsdall’s use of billboards for social and political messaging, Silton has commissioned five Los Angeles-area poets (Rocío Carlos, Cathy Lin Che, Erin Marie Lynch, Lynne Thompson, and Terry Wolverton) to write new works that will be featured on five hand-painted billboards sited during the exhibition among the pine trees in front of the gallery.
Courtesy of Patricia Houghton Clarke
Heading north? Two Exhibitions, and two artists from two ends of Santa Barbara County:
All That Remains is a solo exhibition of work by artist Tom Pazderka, is at the Ann Foxworthy Gallery at Hancock College in Santa Maria now through Friday, Oct. 2, with an artist talk Wednesday, Sept. 2, followed by a reception.
Pazderka’s use of wildfire ash is both material and metaphor. Ash entered his practice as an object of fascination, fragile and elemental, carrying the physical evidence of destruction while also suggesting what might come after it. He eventually began incorporating it directly into his oils, turning the residue of catastrophe into a medium for contemplation and beauty.
Out of the Blue is a solo exhibition by Patricia Houghton Clarke, Saturday, Aug. 29 through Saturday, Nov. 21 at her gallery/studio in the Palm Lofts in Carpinteria.
For Clarke, the work began with the simple ritual of walking and observing. Every morning she’d walk the beach near her Carpinteria home at dawn.
Sometimes she returned later in the day; sometimes she walked again after dark. Always with camera in hand, she observed the shoreline as a landscape continually shifting in the field of light, color, reflection and form.
The photographs were initially a way of keeping her photographic practice active and of sharpening her attention to the world around her. Repetition began to alter the nature of that attention. Returning to the same stretch of beach under differing conditions, Clarke saw the familiar become unfamiliar—that is, changes in light and atmosphere.