Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

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Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is the longest running institution in Los Angeles devoted solely to exhibiting art.
(271)

For the past 40 years, we have served the artists of the Los Angeles arts community from San Barbara to San Diego. The Gallery also, administers an exhibition program along with Los Angeles World Airports Art Exhibition Program at LAX and ONT Airports. The program invites guest curators to curate and mount exhibitions of local and international artists. Museum Education and Tours Program: Provides

free gallery lessons based on art exhibition and hands-on art making component to school-aged children from first through 9th grades in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Free adult education programming: “Conversations with the Artist” programs, panel discussions with artists and develops and provides free art programs for Youth-at-Risk groups, high school level. The gallery and the education program provide a year-round art and education internship program for college students and participate in the Summer Getty Multicultural Internship program.

05/27/2026

Heavy Metal Artist Spotlight Part 7

Kelly Lamb

(b. Salem, MA)
Lives and works in Los Angeles

Upon These Bones, 2025
Walnut, mirror-polished stainless steel

Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Chris McPherson

Kelly Lamb is a multidisciplinary artist working with diverse materials and forms that explore the intersecting layers of history, identity, politics and culture. Lamb’s work explores mythology and the cycles of creation and destruction to reframe historical perspectives. She is inspired by the raw materiality of objects and how the process of making them parallels organic, universal creation. Lamb is drawn to the juxtaposition of the spirit and material world, natural and unnatural algorithms, and themes of infinity and continuum. She uses new technologies and classical materials to create contemporary fossils and relics which explore the intertwined dialogues between art, identity, nature, and technology.

Upon These Bones evokes what lies beneath the surface, reflecting the pressures of societal expectations and the hidden constraints imposed, particularly from a feminist perspective. Derived from a bison bone, digitally scanned and reconstructed with multiple walnut pieces, each representing the lineage of a tree, the work forms a bench-like structure that confronts the viewer and invites direct interaction.

05/20/2026

Heavy Metal Artist Spotlight Part 6

Abigail Lucien
(b. 1992)
Lives and works in Queens, New York

Kindling, 2023.
Enamel, vinyl, powder coat, and flock on steel, stained glass

Abigail Lucien is a Haitian American interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, writing, and time-based media. Informed by her upbringing in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti and Florida, Lucien explores themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, nostalgia, and memory. Her work considers our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief and care, implicating material and place through an architectural vernacular. Using formal poetics, she approaches loss, love, and grief not as fixed states but as fluid processions.

Lucien harnesses the alchemy of heat and imagination as catalysts for metamorphosis. Sculptures, reliefs, and intricate drawings emerge through a sustained engagement with heat — whether fused, softened, or scorched. Her practice reflects a deep investment in welding and material malleability. Inspired by Caribbean storytelling traditions, fantasy, histories and futures intertwine. In Kindling, Lucien references a great fire at her grandparents’ dairy farm, evoking the rural landscape of her youth and the fabled burning house that lingers in memory, where material and spiritual, softness and ethereality, converge.

Courtesy of the artist. Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

05/15/2026

Heavy Metal Artist Spotlight Part 5

Brie Ruais
(b. 1982, Southern California)
Lives and works in Santa Fe, NM

Slide 1
Compressing Westward, Three Times 135 lbs, 2019
Stoneware, glaze, hardware
Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda NY | LA

Slide 2
Within the Petaling, 130lbs, 2025
Stoneware, glaze, hardware
Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery

Brie Ruais’s movement-based practice is visible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces of her ceramic sculptures. Each work begins with clay equal to Ruais’s body weight, producing human-scale forms that establish an intimate relationship with the viewer’s own physical presence. Through a process grounded in physical engagement, the works register the body as both tool and measure.

Ruais gathers clay from quarries through acts of digging, pressing, and lifting that require direct bodily contact with the earth. The marks created during this excavation process become a source for the sculptural forms that emerge later in the studio. There, Ruais repeats these gestures, pressing her full body weight into the clay and allowing movement to guide the shaping of the material. The resulting works function as tactile records of contact between body and earth, inviting viewers into a sensorial encounter that foregrounds physical knowledge and embodied experience.

05/13/2026

Carolyn Salas
(b. Hollywood, CA)
Lives and works in Brooklyn and Upstate New York

Slide 1
Moon Fold, 2024
Powder coated aluminum

Slide 2
Navigator, 2024

Powder-coated aluminum

Slide 3
Untitled, 2020
Powder coated aluminum

Courtesy of the artist

Carolyn Salas makes work that oscillates between abstraction and figuration, and between site-specific installations and sculpture. She uses an array of materials including found objects, collage, craft-oriented assemblages, fabric, and recycled items. Inspired by ancient reliefs, caryatids, and sacred architecture, her work draws on a long lineage of the female form. She is interested in the “in-between” states, where the tension exists within both the physical and psychological space.

Salas’s process is physically demanding, often requiring her to use her body to push and pull the material. Many works begin as hand-drawn sketches or foam-core maquettes, then move through digital 3D renderings before being realized in aluminum or wood. For LAMAG’s presentation, the works on view consist of stylized, fragmented aluminum cutouts that evoke Matisse, Egyptian carvings, and Brâncuși with a distinctly feminist twist. Accentuated by painted walls and pedestals, Salas’s bright white sculptures create a modernist landscape that shifts as viewers move around it.

05/08/2026

Join us on Saturday, May 30th at 12:00 pm!

Paige Emery will be offering an ecopoetic tea ceremony and guided meditation for listening to plants through the memory of water and moving with Earthly time through the end of a world. Herbal tea will be served and Paige will accompany the ceremony with live music. This piece is both an activation of her installation at LAMAG, and a community offering of ecological connection.

Paige Emery is an ecological artist, herbalist, and medicinal practitioner whose work explores rituals of remembering our relationship with the Earth. Rooted in art, ancestral medicine, eco-philosophy, and environmental activism, her practice connects inner states of awareness with broader ecological systems. Working across painting, installation, performance, and guided ecological experiences, Emery engages forms such as plant-based paintings, site-responsive land works, community rituals, and ecology walks. These projects invite reflection on reciprocity and care between human and more-than-human worlds.

Tea Ceremony for Divinatory Ecologies for More than Human Time with Paige Emery is a public program derived from the group exhibition Heavy Metal curated by LAMAG curator Nancy Meyer.

05/07/2026

Heavy Metal Artist Spotlight, Part 3

Davina Semo
(b. 1981, Washington, DC)
Lives and works in San Francisco, CA

Slide 1
Treasure, 2025
Patinated cast bronze bell, patinated solid bronze clapper, h**p sh***ri rope, powder-
coated stainless steel hardware, powder-coated zinc-plated steel chain

Slide 2
Talon, 2025
Polished and patinated cast bronze bell, solid bronze clapper, h**p sh***ri rope, powder-coated stainless steel hardware, powder-coated zinc-plated steel chain

Davina Semo’s sculptural practice brings together cast bronze bells, polished reliefs, and mirrored surfaces to explore how material form can hold experiential, emotional, and psychological resonance. Since 2017, Semo has returned to the bell as both sculptural object and instrument, drawing on its long history, from its emergence in Neolithic China and the Fertile Crescent, where it was used to track livestock, to its evolving role in summoning communities, marking time, and signaling moments of danger or celebration.

Cast in bronze and finished with varied patinas, textures, and painted details, her bells playfully reinterpret traditional forms while remaining fully functional. Through this interplay of sound, reflection, and touch, Semo’s works become moments of shared attention, emphasizing the relationship between body, material, and environment while recalling the collective rituals historically bound to the ringing of bells.

Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

05/06/2026

Heavy Metal Artist Spotlight, Part 2

Kelly Wall
(b. 1990, Los Angeles, CA)
Lives and works in Mar Vista, CA

temporal prayer, 2022
Glass, lead, aluminum

Kelly Wall has long been fascinated by the objects that populate the edges of everyday experience — souvenirs, props, tchotchkes, and the display systems that quietly shape memory and meaning. Her practice recreates these forms with meticulous craftsmanship, often using stained glass to transform commonplace objects into sites of reflection, nostalgia, and subtle wonder. Drawing on the layered myths, landscapes, and narratives of Los Angeles, Wall invites viewers to reconsider the familiar and question how memories are constructed and preserved.

temporal prayer takes this inquiry further, presenting a glass bench etched with excerpts from John Steinbeck and Joan Didion, and featuring a “grief knot,” a symbol of fragile bonds and impermanence. Through its delicate materiality and layered references, the work encourages contemplation of purpose, attachment, and the passage of time.

Courtesy of the artist

05/02/2026

Heavy Metal Artist Spotlight, Part 1

Lisa Williamson
(b. 1977, Champaign-Urbana, IL)
Lives and works in Los Angeles

Sir, 2025
Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood

Lisa Williamson creates works that combine visual precision with physical presence, carefully responding to the spaces they occupy. She treats exactness as an expressive gesture and calibration as a creative process, balancing color, surface, and form to blur distinctions between abstraction and figuration, painting and sculpture, language and object. Williamson often uses her own body or architectural dimensions as a measuring tool, resulting in forms defined by proportion, balance, and formal restraint.

Evoking both a tuxedo and a flute, Sir is painted in black and cream, its vertical line of pale peach dots animates the surface, giving the piece a subtle movement that seems to extend from the walls. Through its interplay of form and space, the sculpture conveys both energy and human presence.

Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

05/01/2026

Join us for the release of the Step & Repeat catalog on Saturday, May 16th at 2 pm! This fully illustrated, 68-page publication features texts on each artist’s work, along with essays by Nancy Meyer and John Weston. We hope you’ll join us to celebrate the exhibition one last time!

Get your copy and find more info at our Linktree in our bio.

04/23/2026

On view now at LAMAG:

Ivan Bridges

Ivan Bridges (b. 1984, Portland, OR) explores the psychological resonance of concealed memories, translating internal drives into expressive, revelatory gestures. Drawing on found images from cult cinema, fe**sh culture, and vintage photography, he imbues his figures with personal narratives through painterly distortion.

Using loose, delicate strokes in watercolor and oil on paper and raw canvas, Bridges traces his psyche, addressing themes of desire, fear, and control. By limiting himself to the fewest possible marks, he evokes visceral, emotional responses, transforming cerebral impulses into immediate, tactile experiences. Through delicate strokes in watercolor and oil on raw canvas, Bridges traces desire, fear, and control, inviting visceral, emotional responses from the viewer.

Reflecting on his practice, Bridges explains:

"I really identify with Duchamp when he says that all of art making is an urge… I see it fundamentally as an obsessive urge, something I’ve never been able to quit, so it seems to put it in its place as urge."

Photos:
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photos by Robert Wedemeyer.

04/22/2026

On view now at LAMAG:

Rachel Bridges: I’m Not Your Filipina

Rachel Bridges (b. 1982, San Francisco, CA) is a first-generation Filipino American artist based in Los Angeles. Her work conjures historical narratives of struggle and resistance, drawing from familial roots and ancestral spirituality to explore the emotional and cultural reverberations of colonialism across the Filipino diaspora. Bridges revives the heritages of her matrilineal line, addressing gaps in family histories fractured by generations of conflict.

The exhibition title, I’m Not Your Filipina, riffs on I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck and based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House. For LAMAG’s presentation, Bridges includes three paintings from her White Out series: Illuminated by the Subtle Bleeding Light, Sampaguita, and Who Lick a Rare Heart?. These works confront identity, memory, and the enduring effects of colonial histories through processes of hiding, exposing, and unfolding within painting.

Inspired by Robert Ryman and Pope.L, Bridges “whites out” her paintings as an act of subversive defiance and resistance. Through repetition, shadow, and subtle color interaction, she investigates paint’s material properties with a restrained, minimalist approach.

Rachel Bridges: I’m Not Your Filipina is curated by Nancy Meyer, LAMAG curator, with research and administrative support by Zandra Sweeney, OXY InternLA 2025.

Photos:
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photos by Robert Wedemeyer.

Address

4800 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA
90027

Telephone

+13236446269

Website

https://linktr.ee/lamagbarnsdall

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