What to See at L.A. Art Week 2026

In Los Angeles, distance is never neutral. During Frieze week, the city’s geography can quickly turn excitement into exhaustion, making focus feel like a strategy rather than a luxury. Our list narrows the field to the art stops throughout the week that justify the mileage.

The Main Show: Frieze L.A.

Settled into its Santa Monica Airport home now, Frieze L.A. has spent years perfecting its layout. And those efforts have culminated in creating what looks, on paper, like one of the most promising configurations yet. The tent welcomes guests in with the best of Los Angeles (Hoffman Donahue, Nonaka-Hill, Parker Gallery, David Kordansky, and more), and then you make your way to the international giants. This means there is a chance of discovery both on the way and on the return from the stalwarts. As per usual, Frieze L.A. has worked with Art Production Fund to festoon their sprawling L.A. campus with art so as not to make the golf carts or long walks across the pavement too taxing or aesthetically starved. There is beauty everywhere, even if we still miss the bygone days of Frieze L.A. at the Paramount picture lot.

The Side Stages: Post-Fair and Felix Art Fair

The two satellite stages orbiting Frieze L.A. ultimately serve the same purpose of giving younger galleries an affordable way to show up in Los Angeles, yet they couldn’t feel more different in how they get the job done. Felix Art Fair is the older, more chaotic sibling. Set inside the Roosevelt Hotel, Felix plays out like a roving treasure hunt. Imagine: indulging in big ceramics (and drinks) by the pool, and collectors ducking into rooms and slipping off their sunglasses to better glimpse a painting glowing under bathroom-vanity bulbs. The atmosphere is equal parts art fair and social club, ideally finished with a late-night martini at Musso & Frank down the block.

Post-Fair, by contrast, offers a minimalist alternative to Felix’s theatrics. There are no fruited cocktails, but the vibes are immaculate thanks to meticulously curated booths by aesthetically exacting dealers and the fair’s airy, almost church-like environs. The singular presentations at Post-Fair feel calibrated to shine in Los Angeles’s famously pristine daylight, which floods the historical Santa Monica post office, where Post-Fair has set the scene. Our take? Post-Fair for the day and Felix by evening.

A Warm Welcome to Enzo

Despite the blizzard, New Yorkers, specifically those based in Chinatown and the LES, have shown up in force this week in the form of the week’s newest fair, Enzo. Created by a cadre of young independent dealers from the city (Alyssa Davis, Magenta Plains, Sara’s), the curated presentation will take place in a warehouse in Echo Park.

Institutional Blockbusters

When the art world descends on Los Angeles, the museums inevitably step up. This winter is no exception. The Hammer Museum has extended Made in L.A. 2025 through fair week, ensuring visiting pilgrims don’t miss standout works from the city’s latest biennial, including painter Hannah Hur’s quietly devotional installation. But the show you can’t leave L.A. without seeing is Monuments at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary: a many-years-in-the-making exhibition that assembles decommissioned and defaced Confederate statues alongside contemporary responses by artists such as Kara Walker and Hank Willis Thomas. Removed from their original public settings and recontextualized within the museum, the works confront the unstable terrain between memory and power. It is a once-in-a-lifetime installation and mandatory viewing.

Hometown Heroes

What feels most satisfying this season is the clear investment in ambitious solo presentations by local artists. Informal ambassadors, these shows offer a slice of what L.A. really looks like when all the New Yorkers leave. This list includes a cavalcade of firsts as well: from painter Lauren Quin’s anticipated Pace debut to hyper-realist Sayre Gomez’s first outing with David Kordansky. Both meet the moment with an exuberance that is sure to blow away both the acquainted and the newly initiated. Other essential L.A. viewing in this vein includes a stop into Paul McCarthy at the Journal, Ken Gun Min at Nazarian/Curcio, Christina Quarles’s debut at Hauser and Wirth, and Chateau Satto breakout star Emma McIntyre’s triumphant return to the city after her David Zwirner debut.

Fun After Dark

If your days are already packed with appointments around town, don’t fear—Los Angeles has an after-hours art scene. Case in point: the Julia Stoschek Collection’s temporary residency at the Arts Variety Theater, a roving video exhibition featuring more than forty artists from one of the most important media collections in the world. Expect cult favorites like Bunny Rogers and Arthur Jafa alongside popcorn, drinks, and a midnight closing time. If you are looking for something more soothing, Calvin Marcus also has a one-week show at City Spa.

For more scheduled play, try hopping on the waitlist for New Hollywood Theater’s latest California Gothic bus tour led by Oliver Misraje. The black-box venue has quietly become a hub for experimental performance with a sharp sense of humor.

Know Your History

Another welcome trend of L.A. Art Week is a wave of place-setting exhibitions that unpack the city’s archival riches. A standout example arrives courtesy of art historian Alberto Cuatro and the Society of Art and Living Archives (SALA), who revisit the legacy of Cirrus Gallery, the era-defining print workshop that produced work by figures such as Barbara T. Smith, Chris Burden, and Ed Ruscha. Runners-up include David Zwirner’s Raymond Saunders show, Gemini G.E.L.’s sixty-year survey, and Commonwealth and Council’s first posthumous Pippa Garner show.

Change of Address

Two influential local galleries have new spaces worthy of pilgrimage. Hoffman Donahue has set up a new Beverly Hills outpost outfitted with a pitch-perfect debut show: a mini-survey of living iconoclast Lynn Hershman Leeson. Leeson, whose long-running alter ego Roberta Breitmore anticipated today’s culture of synthetic identities and mediated selfhood, makes the artist an uncanny fit for Beverly Hills, where Hollywood mythologies and technological fantasies have always collided.

Temporarily hosted in Jorge Pardo’s famous Mount Washington home, Sara Hantman’s trendsetting gallery, Sea View, has landed a more permanent place in Hollywood, and to inaugurate the domestically multi-floored hub, they have assembled two solo shows: Zenobia Lee and Grigoris Semitecolo, both of which speak to the gallery’s commitment to discovery and putting local talent on blast.

Day Trips

If you’re willing to go a little further afield for a visual payoff, the rewards shift from spectacle to perspective. At The Cheech in Riverside, Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966–2026 traces decades of lens-based practices rooted in activism and community, offering a necessary counterpoint to the week’s market pace. Closer to the coast but still outside the fair’s immediate orbit, Harmonia Rosales’s paintings at the Getty Center quietly rewrite canonical imagery through a diasporic lens.