Department of Art History

Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey
September 17, 2024 – June 15, 2025

For several decades, artist Cai Guo-Qiang has used gunpowder and pyrotechnics to create drawings, paintings, and explosion events. The exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang:A Material Odyssey will fill the first floor galleries at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Based on years of research by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute, A Material Odyssey will explore the nature and properties of gunpowder and chronicle its use by the artist. This explosive material, invented in China over 1,100 years ago, has come to define Cai’s work. Its unpredictable nature dictates his artistic process and determines the outcome. Through gunpowder, the artist invites uncontrollable forces to participate in the creation of his work. With an abundance of artworks and scientific displays, the exhibition will narrate the lifelong love story of Cai Guo-Qiang with gunpowder.

The museum is closed Monday and Tuesdays.
Hours 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Yoshitomo Nara: I Don’t Want to Grow Up
May 28, 2025 – December 28, 2025

Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara is best known for his depictions of children—who appear across his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations—to convey the broad spectrum of human emotions. Reflecting the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self, his portraits capture the common condition of growing up—a space of defiance and menace, melancholy and anxiety, freedom and loneliness, through to joy and ecstasy.

The museum is closed Monday and Tuesdays.
Hours 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Retrospect: 50 Years at the Norton Simon Museum
February 14, 2025, to January 12, 2026

Through rare photos from the Museum’s archive, Retrospect highlights both significant and lesser-known stories from the Museum’s 50-year history. This small exhibition is held in the Museum’s Focus Gallery.

The museum is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Hours 12:00 am – 5:00 pm

Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece
Jun 10–Sep 14, 2025

In 2020, a massive explosion in the port of Beirut devastated the city. Among the wreckage was a previously unknown painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, the most celebrated woman painter of 17th-century Italy. Depicting a scene from the Greek myth of Hercules, the severely damaged painting came to Getty for in-depth conservation treatment. In an installation focused on its repair, the restored painting is accompanied by four of Gentileschi’s other paintings, highlighting her special focus on donne forti (strong women) from the classical and biblical traditions.

Getty Center
Museum East Pavilion, Upper Level

All exhibitions are included in your free, timed-entry reservation to Getty. Reservations are available six weeks in advance. Please note, there is a fee for parking.

The Space We Take: Portraits from the Archive
June 13 – September 13 2025

The Space We Take brings together a selection of portraits from the ONE Archives collection across a range of media, with many of them on view for the first time. From photography to intaglio prints and oil painting to assemblage, these works speak to the human instinct to depict ourselves and others as well as the desire to see ourselves in others. The sitters or subjects likely never imagined themselves alongside their odd companions. Here, the soft gaze of an unknown female sitter, captured in an albumen print, catches a glance of leathered lawyer Owen Trainer (1993-94) in Gordon Pollock’s equestrian inspired motorcycle portrait. Eve Fowler’s young wrestler towers over Mundo Meza’s marker-on-velvet portrait of Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones (Brian, c. 1969). Laura Aguilar’s black and white Gil Cuadros portrait from 1980 is juxtaposed with Michael Hossner’s colossal abstract Paule (Anglim). Despite their differences, they all have ONE thing in common, and their home at the Archives cements their place in our history.

ONE Archives at the USC Libraries
909 West Adams Boulevard
Los Angeles , CA 90007

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

On view Sept 15, 2024 – July 6, 2025
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Tuesday and Sunday, 11am–5pm.
All visitors should reserve an online ticket.

Artist Selects: Frances Stark, Periodic Love and Perpetual War
June 13–November 9, 2025

Since the 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Frances Stark has created a vast body of work that examines systems of communication and the nature of intimacy. She is the second participant in the Artist Selects series, which invites artists to create an exhibition with works from LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Guided by formal and thematic rhymes, Stark’s visual essay brings together works by Karl Blossfeldt, Otto Dix, Wassily Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, and others. In a world that is out of joint, Stark grapples with questions about the role of the artist amid the cycles of passion, creation, and violent destruction that characterize the human experience.

BCAM, Level 3

Ken Gonzales- Day: History’s “Nevermade
August 19, 2025 – March 14, 2026

Exploring cultural memory through his photographs, drawings, and paintings as well as through research and scholarship, artist, teacher, and scholar Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) has contributed profound insights over his 30-year career to the understanding of race and place in the United States. This survey exhibition seeks to put the major series of photographic works, film/video, drawings, and paintings in context, showing the deep political and theoretical concerns through which Gonzales-Day animates the range of works and pointing to larger American political issues in relation to which each series can be understood.

Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena
April 15 – October 12, 2025

In January 2025, wildfires erupted in Los Angeles, ripping through residential neighborhoods on both the west and east sides of the county. On the west side, the Palisades Fire consumed the oceanside communities of Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. On the east side, the Eaton Fire set ablaze the mountainside communities of Pasadena and Sierra Madre and overtook the town of Altadena, reducing much of it to ash.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Altadena was home to a burgeoning Black community and was hailed as the epicenter of Black arts activity in Los Angeles County. Though this designation arguably shifted to the South Central neighborhood of Watts in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Altadena continued to develop as a vibrant and creative haven with a distinctive Black cultural imprint. Since then, Altadena and the adjacent city of Pasadena have served as home to an extraordinary array of Black artists, educators, musicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and activists.

Ode to ’Dena lauds the rich and dynamic Black cultural heritage of Altadena. It surveys the town’s enduring legacy through the work and stories of an intergenerational group of artists and culture bearers that have called it home.

Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena is curated by Dominique Clayton, independent curator and founder of Dominique Gallery, in community with Larry Earl, Kenturah Davis, Arianne Edmonds, Dylan Joyner, and V. Joy Simmons, MD.

The eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington
October 18, 2025 October 26, 2026

The Huntington presents the evocative works of acclaimed British artist and author Edmund de Waal in “the eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington.” This yearlong exhibition features de Waal’s site-specific installations at three iconic Huntington sites: the Huntington Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden, and the Japanese Garden.

Huntington Art Gallery, Chinese Garden, and Japanese Garden