This month’s exhibitions bring a transformative twist to the everyday, imbuing mundane items with psychological, political, and personal depth. At Regen Projects, Kevin Beasley embeds clothing and other objects into luminous and vibrant resin panels, while at Parker Gallery, Zachary Leener’s evocative ceramic sculptures contain hair, debris, and other personal effects. Marnie Weber’s The Dollhouse (2002) is an immersive, surreal vision of femininity incorporating sculpture, photography, and collage. Fidencio Fifield-Perez creates mesmerizing geometric patterns and lush still lifes from the soulless documentation of state surveillance. And at Beyond the Streets, Deadly Prey Gallery has curated a show of hand-painted movie posters from Ghana’s mobile cinema industry, ad hoc advertisements that embellish Hollywood narratives with gore, guns, and layers of apocryphal eccentricities.
Kevin Beasley: What delineates the edge
Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through August 16
Kevin Beasley is known for his unique use of resin that transforms commonplace items into translucent abstractions. What delineates the edge highlights two new bodies of work: freestanding screens and wall-mounted panels. The screens incorporate textiles, garments, wood, steel, and resin, creating sculptural compositions of color, light, and texture imbued with human presence. The wall works, dubbed Synths, similarly feature items with specific and universal resonances embedded within resin supports. Their title references the manner in which synthesizers translate unintelligible electronic code into accessible sonic output.
Zachary Leener: Cloud Chips
Parker Gallery, 6700 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through August 16
Zachary Leener’s enigmatic terra cotta sculptures take precedents like Ken Price‘s organic minimalism or Robert Arneson’s outlandish Funk art, mashing them into novel, enigmatic forms. He often adds items that bear personal meaning into his clay body, lending the resulting sculptures an autobiographical significance. Cloud Chips features nine new ceramic works that highlight his mix of playful formalism and psychological depth.
Fidencio Fifield-Perez: not never over nothing
Commonwealth and Council, 3006 West 7th Street, Suite 220, Koreatown, Los Angeles
Through August 16
Fidencio Fifield-Perez wields painting, weaving, and collage to transform the materials of bureaucratic control into exquisite testaments to individual perseverance. He works with cold, impersonal documents related to the state’s immigration machine, a Kafkaesque system that the Oaxacan-born artist became all too familiar with during his experience applying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Fifield-Perez weaves this paperwork into patterns inspired by petate weaving and paints delicate images of plants on top, signs of life thriving amidst the backdrop of institutional indifference.
VHS Dreams: The Art of Ghana’s Mobile Cinema
Beyond the Streets, 434 North La Brea Avenue, Fairfax, Los Angeles
Through August 23
In the 1980s, mobile video clubs sprung up throughout Ghana as enterprising operators traveled from village to village with generators, TVs, and VCR tapes of Hollywood and West African action, horror, and martial arts films. To promote this nascent industry, they employed local artists to paint film posters that embellished salient plot points with exaggerated violence and fantasy. Curated by Deadly Prey Gallery, VHS Dreams spans 30 years of this still-evolving art form, showcasing a selection of one-of-a-kind paintings by Mark Anthony, Bright Obeng, Heavy J, H.K. Matthias, C.A. Wisely, Mr. Nana Agyq, and many others.
America (Soy Yo!)
Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Through August 30
Curated by Ever Velasquez, America (Soy Yo!) is a timely group show that brings together artists from the US, Mexico, Central and South America, and Canada, all of whom wrestle with issues surrounding migration, borders, and identity. The exhibition takes its title from the 1986 song by the norteño band Los Tigres Del Norte, which celebrates the people and land of the Americas, and whose lyrics proclaim: “Porque América es todo el continente, y el que nace aquí, es americano (Because America is the entire continent, and he who is born here is American).” Participating artists include Judith F. Baca, Barbara Carrasco, Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné), Nehemiah Cisneros, michon sanders, and many more.
Marnie Weber: The Dollhouse
Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, California
Through September 1
Marnie Weber’s The Dollhouse (2002) is a storybook house composed of 11 rooms, each of which reveals another chapter in this surreal, psychological drama. The monumental model measuring six by 10 feet (~1.8 by three meters) features a snow-filled room with a frozen pond, a dust room covered in sheets, an autumn room filled with leaves, and a waterfall cascading down the grand staircase. Weber photographed each room, collaging ghost-like figures, models clipped from magazines, and animals into the c-prints, suggesting narratives that are absent from the sculptural home. This exhibition offers a rare chance to see the complete work, which hasn’t been shown in Southern California since 2005.
Puppet Master’s Playground
Goethe Institut, 1901 West 7th Street, Suite AB, Westlake, Los Angeles
Through September 4
Cain Carias (also known as PuppetMaster213) is an LA-based artist and puppeteer who blends traditional marionette craft with elements of SoCal Chicanx culture. He studied and worked with the legendary late marionette pioneer Bob Baker for 15 years before creating his own characters, including “La Smiley” and “El Triste,” a clown-faced couple whom he calls “the King and Queen of MacArthur Park,” a major hub for LA’s Mexican and Central American communities. Rife with marionettes, painting, photography, performances, and workshops, Puppet Master’s Playground is an interactive exhibition that allows the public to experience the wonder of Carias’s vision.
TOMATÂ
MutMuz Gallery, 971 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles
August 15–September 15
The late Tomatâ du Plenty (born David Xavier Harrigan) was a seminal figure in LA’s punk scene as lead singer for the Screamers, as well as a founder of Seattle performance art troupe Ze Whiz Kidz and, briefly, a member of queer psychedelic theater group the Cockettes. After his influential career in music, he turned to visual art before his untimely death from cancer in 2000 at the age of 52. TOMATÂ brings together his rarely exhibited paintings on paper, canvas, and wood alongside ephemera and photographs, capturing the breadth of his creative life.
William S. Burroughs: Bergamot Redux 1995-2025
Robert Berman Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, #A5, Santa Monica, California
Through September 30
In 1995, Robert Berman Gallery and Track 16 Gallery mounted Concrete and Buckshot, one of the first exhibitions of William S. Burroughs’s visual art in Los Angeles. Thirty years later, Berman restages and expands that show with William S. Burroughs: Bergamot Redux. This enlarged iteration includes Burroughs’s abstract paintings from the 1990s and his woodcut and screenprint series The Seven Deadly Sins (1991), alongside artwork by Dennis Hopper and photographs by Christopher Felver, John Colao, and Allen Ginsberg.
A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound
LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, 501 North Main Street, Downtown, Los Angeles
Through August 23, 2026
For decades, LA’s greater Eastside has cultivated a multi-generational Latinx music scene spanning rock, soul, punk, hip hop, and traditional Mexican music that has expanded beyond its local roots to achieve widespread popularity. A Great Day in East L.A. showcases the photographs of Piero F. Giunti, who has collaborated for the past 10 years with musician Mark Guerrero to document the stories and images of this diverse group of musicians, including ¡Aparato!, Aztlan Underground, Mezklah, Cambalache, Los Lobos, and The Brat. Alongside Giunti’s portraits, the exhibition gathers over 500 albums, instruments, flyers, costumes, videos, and other ephemera, providing a comprehensive history of this vibrant community.
