6 Museum Exhibitions to Anchor Frieze Week Los Angeles

As Frieze Los Angeles draws collectors, curators, and artists to the city, the week offers an opportunity to look beyond the fair tents and into the institutions shaping Los Angeles’s cultural heart. From immersive contemporary installations and ambitious sculptural surveys to historic architecture activated by new commissions, this year’s museum exhibitions sketch a dynamic portrait of how art is being made, recontextualized, and experienced right now. Spanning neighborhoods from Brentwood to Downtown and Westwood, these shows reward close looking and sustained time—offering moments of reflection, surprise, and scale that anchor Frieze Week in the deeper rhythms of the city itself.

“Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages”

The Getty

Brentwood

At the Getty Center, “Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages” offers a rare and resonant dialogue between medieval illuminated manuscripts and contemporary painting. Anchored by works from Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, the exhibition examines how narratives of creation have been portrayed, elucidated, and transferred across centuries. Rosales’s paintings—rooted in Yoruba cosmology and Renaissance compositional strategies—are presented alongside treasures from the Getty’s manuscript collection, reframing origin stories through a lens that spotlights Black presence, spirituality, and authorship. A major highlight is Rosales’s newly commissioned work responding to the Getty’s Stammheim Missal, marking her first major collaboration with the beloved institution. The exhibition deftly connects past and present, positioning medieval visual culture as a living framework open to reinterpretation. 

What we love: During Frieze Week, it offers a contemplative counterpoint to the fair’s contemporary buzz, grounding visitors in questions of belief, power, and the stories we inherit—and choose to retell.

“Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages” at The Getty
January 27–April 19, 2026

Ryan Preciado: “Diary of a Fly”

Hollyhock House

East Hollywood

Radiating within Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Hollyhock House, “Diary of a Fly” is a site-responsive presentation that activates architecture, music, and material experimentation. Los Angeles–based artist Ryan Preciado offers fresh textiles and sculptures that respond directly to the house’s melodic motifs and its century-long legacy as a stage for pure creative exploration. The exhibition takes its title from a late-1930s Béla Bartók composition that mimics the frenetic movement of a fly—a metaphor that echoes Preciado’s layered approach to pattern, repetition, and lived experience. Highlights include a sweeping geometric sculpture in the inner courtyard and handwoven textiles produced in collaboration with a skillful family of weavers in Oaxaca.The mesmeric works blur distinctions between art and utility, sculpture and design, while honoring the social histories embedded in materials. 

What we love: The exhibition gifts visitors a rare chance to experience contemporary art within one of Los Angeles’s most storied architectural landmarks.

Ryan Preciado at Hollyhock House
January 22–April 25, 2026

“SUEÑO PERRO”: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

LACMA

Miracle Mile

At LACMA, “SUEÑO PERRO” raises the curtain on a film installation by Alejandro G. Iñárritu that reconsiders cinema as a physical and spatial medium. Created in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Amores Perros (2000), the installation draws from an archive rarely seen: more than a million feet of footage removed during the film’s original edit. These fragments—untethered from plot or sequence—are projected through an array of 35mm machines, forming a shifting field of image and sound. Memories of Mexico City gathered across decades surface and recede, creating a portrait built from accumulation rather than narrative. “SUEÑO PERRO” focuses on what was left behind, treating discarded footage as material with its own presence and duration. 

What we love: The installation allows for a unique encounter with cinema slowed down and unwrapped—a soulful voyage that asks how many possible films can exist inside a single one.

“SUEÑO PERRO” at LACMA
Feb 22–Jul 26, 2026

“Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous”

Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

Downtown Los Angeles

At MOCA Grand Avenue, “Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous” celebrates the U.S. debut of a major, enveloping installation by the internationally renowned Seoul-born artist. Known for her sculptural environments composed of venetian blinds, light, sound, and movement, Yang sparks a highly sensorial human experience that unfolds dynamically across space and time. This exhibition reflects the culmination of a decade-long engagement with the legacy of avant-garde composer Isang Yun, whose life as a transnational, diasporic figure informs the work’s emotional and political resonance. The presentation is part of a rare institutional collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and extends beyond the gallery with a one-night performance of Yun’s Double Concerto at Walt Disney Concert Hall on March 10, 2026. Fusing visual art, music, and architecture, “Star-Crossed Rendezvous” transforms MOCA into a site of listening as much as looking—an experience that feels both intimate and expansive. 

What we love: The exhibition is anchored by a landmark November 2025 symposium at MOCA—the first North American academic gathering to honor composer Isang Yun—which brought musicologists, composers, and historians together to position research and listening as vital extensions of the work.

Haegue Yang at MOCA Grand Avenue
February 24 – Aug 2, 2026

“Robert Therrien: This Is a Story”

The Broad

Downtown Los Angeles

The Broad unveils the most expansive museum exhibition to date of the late artist Robert Therrien, whose monumental reimagining of everyday objects deeply influenced contemporary sculpture. Highlighting over 120 works across five decades, “This Is a Story” immerses visitors in Therrien’s distinctive universe of exaggerated scale, quiet humor, and perceptual play. From towering tables and chairs to mesmeric drawings and studio reconstructions, the exhibition illuminates how Therrien transformed domestic familiarity into something uncanny and poetic. Powerfully tied to Los Angeles—where the artist lived and worked for nearly thirty years—the show situates his practice within the city’s broader sculptural legacy. Timed to coincide with Frieze Week, the exhibition is accompanied by dazzling live programming throughout the museum through sound, conversation, and performance, reinforcing Therrien’s belief in art as an experiential encounter.

What we love: That the exhibition comes alive during Frieze Los Angeles with the February 28 panel Distinct Encounters through Object Making—a curator-led conversation, moderated by Ed Schad, bringing together Isabelle Albuquerque, Sharif Farrag, and Guadalupe Rosales to examine how contemporary L.A. sculpture creates intimate, concentrated encounters with viewers.

Robert Therrien at The Broad
November 22 – April 5, 2026

“Made in L.A. 2025”

Hammer Museum

Westwood

The Hammer Museum’s signature biennial, “Made in L.A.,” returns with a rapturous survey of artists imagining and creating in Los Angeles. Spotlighting 28 participants across disciplines including film, painting, sculpture, performance, and sound, the exhibition foregrounds emerging and under-recognized voices shaping the city’s vivacious cultural landscape. Magnificently organized by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, the biennial resists a singular theme, instead giving space for the exhibition to radiate through the artists’ distinct practices and perspectives. Many of the works are newly produced, offering an immediate snapshot of artistic production in Los Angeles today. A companion outdoor sculpture—Alake Shilling’s soaring, inflatable Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A.—generously brings the exhibition into public space. “Made in L.A. 2025” fully embraces local experimentation and community-driven creativity.

What we love: The exhibition is perceptively accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue of artist interviews as well as a shimmering program of performances including Will Rawls: Unmade, Leilah Weinraub: The Kids, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola: 1-2-3: Apartment Gallery, and more.

“Made in L.A. 2025” at The Hammer Museum
October 5, 2025 – March 1, 2026