10 Shows to See in Los Angeles This June

This month’s selection looks at legacies and the strands of culture, resilience, pain, and tradition that bind us together across time. Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s paintings offer contemporary reflections on his familial connection to protest. In the works of Veronica Fernandez and Tidawhitney Lek, mundane family scenes are interrupted by ghosts of the past. A group show explores the historical rupture and unsettling recent echoes of the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915, while Keith Mayerson’s multi-faceted portrait of Los Angeles as a site of potentiality draws on memories both personal and collective. And a restaging of Otto Piene’s 1966-67 message of hope in the face of nuclear annihilation resonates with the existential crises of our current moment.

We’ve picked three exhibitions to explore below, and read more about all 10 exhibitions in our Los Angeles art show guide for June.

Gloria Klein: Unbinding Unwinding
at Anat Ebgi through June 15

Gloria Klein emerged as a painter in the heady downtown New York art scene of the 1970s. Her colorful, hard-edge abstractions reflect several trends of the time, from Minimalism and Conceptualism to the Pattern and Decoration and Feminist Art movements. Unbinding Unwinding, the late artist’s first show in Los Angeles, features work from the 1970s and ’80s, including early text-based diagrammatic drawings.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
at The Broad through September 29

Through a practice that includes collage, installation, photography, and the rhinestone-encrusted paintings for which she is best known Mickalene Thomas celebrates Black femininity as a means for healing, empowerment, and liberation. Borrowing its title from a text by bell hooks’s All About Love (2018), Thomas’s first major touring exhibition features more than 80 works made over the last two decades. 

Simone Leigh
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African-American Museum through January 20, 2025

Simone Leigh’s two-venue museum survey spans the last 20 years of her career, with the California African American Museum highlighting her film and video work, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showcasing her large-scale sculpture, and both institutions featuring pieces from her presentation in the US pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Leigh’s multi-layered practice explores the complexities of Black female identity, incorporating art forms and traditions from throughout the African diaspora as well as precedents found in African art and architecture.