13ThingsLA: January 1

Then & Now for your art calendar

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Three Sisters, 2022. (Courtesy of the artist)

Welcome, 2025. You’re going to be a weird one. As far as strategies for easing into the uncertain future go, you can’t do much better than art. So please enjoy our first issue of the year, featuring Reviews of the best of all Frida Kahlo movies and very fine PST:ART shows at the Autry Museum and the Marciano Art Foundation, plus recommended exhibitions and events at Neutra-VDL House, La Luz de Jesus, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Various Small Fires, Serious Topics, Tyler Park Presents, Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, Alto Beta, 18th Street Arts Center, and the Academy Museum. We don’t know if art can really save the world, but it can definitely save the day.

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Feature

Wendy Red Star, Stirs Up the Dust, 2011. (Gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D., Autry Museum, Los Angeles; Courtesy of the artist)

REVIEW: Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology at the Autry (PST). This is one of the few exhibitions under the PST:ART aegis that, while perfectly matching the initiative’s expansive spirit of intersecting art and science, contains an undeniable urgency, perspective, and cultural logic that transcends that contextualization. In a very broad way, the exhibition can be thought of along the lines of Afrofuturist world-building—recombining ancestral traditions, stories, and visual tropes with a stridently unconventional, science-fiction inflected vision of liberation, innovation, and long-overdue unfettered excellence in a way that holds power in the present. Across explosively appealing and theatrically stunning fashions, technology-fueled digital and video installations, interactive sculpture, wondrous architectural activations, and quieter moments of craft and saliently narrative fine art, the exhibition presents an Indigenous perspective that infuses what might be with invocations of what has been and what’s been lost. From ecology to Pop art, artifact to avant-garde, advocacy and resilience, healing and counter-history, artists like Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Virgil Ortiz and dozens of others interact with the museum’s holdings and their own flights of fancy to imagine a return to self-determination that’s both thoughtful and spectacular. On view in Griffith Park through June 21, 2026; Tickets: $18; theautry.org. —SND

Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), Jai Nopek, Recon Watchman, 2022. (Courtesy of the artist)

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