This month’s list encompasses comprehensive surveys of established artists and stellar solo shows from the next generation, marking the art world’s return from the leisurely dog days of summer. Chicana artist Linda Vallejo’s retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen covers five decades of her work, while Webber Gallery mounts a recuperative show of the late under-recognized photographer and lesbian activist Tee A. Corinne. Other veteran artists include filmmaker Arthur Jafa, whose exhibition of new work at Sprüth Magers is, surprisingly, his first solo show in LA, and environmental artist Lita Albuquerque, who tears up the floor at Michael Kohn Gallery, metaphorically speaking. Emerging artists including Lotus L. Kang, Aria Dean, Samantha Yun Wall, and Rachael Bos present promising solo shows — evidence that the kids are, indeed, all right.

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Linda Vallejo: Select Works, 1969–2024

Parrasch Heijnen, 1326 South Boyle Avenue, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
Through October 12

For over five decades, Linda Vallejo has explored Chicanx identity and ancestry, nature and spirituality, and tradition and technology through diverse bodies of work that incorporate printmaking, sculpting, painting, and installation. Her career-spanning survey gathers early constructions made from leftover materials and inspired by Mesoamerican architecture; her Tree People series (1980–1990) of assemblages fashioned from pieces of trees found around Los Angeles; and Make ‘Em All Mexican, in which she tinted white porcelain sculptures and photos of mainstream pop culture icons various shades of rich brown. Her most recent series, Self Knowing in the New Age (2023–ongoing), features pixelated portraits and abstractions that explore the relationship between the human and the digital.

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Rachael Bos: Dead Loop

De Boer gallery, 3311 East Pico Boulevard, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
Through October 12

Rachael Bos’s detailed oil paintings of Olympic athletes are characterized by a dry, obsessive focus on surface, form, texture, and pose, rather than on the pomp and glory of the games. In “Feedbacker No. 2” (2024), anonymous gymnasts in gray leotards create a swirling star shape with their arched bodies. Even when the Chicago-based painter chooses well-known subjects, as with a canvas named for Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci, it is not athletic prowess that is highlighted. Bos instead crops the image just above the competitor’s nose, pulling our attention toward the clash between her brown shoes and bright red tracksuit, and the way she nervously wrings her hands.

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Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin

Michael Kohn Gallery, 1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
September 12–October 19

Lita Albuquerque’s practice has long involved engagement with sites outside of the gallery space, dating back to “Malibu Line” (1978), a bright blue path that linked land, sea, and sky, and her first earthwork to use ephemeral pigments (which she recreated earlier this year). Earth Skin reverses this relationship by bringing the landscape into the gallery, with a floor of decomposed granite suggesting a rupture in the barrier between nature and culture. The installation will be accompanied by new gestural paintings linking bodily movement to symbolic mark-making.

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Tahnee Lonsdale: A billion tiny moons

Night Gallery, 2276 East 16th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles
September 14–October 19

The enigmatic figures in Tahnee Lonsdale’s dreamy canvases hover between corporeal dissolution and apparition, as they emerge from layers of oil paint washes before fading back into them. Her stylized female forms recall modernist predecessors such as Paul Klee, while offering contemporary takes on 20th-century existential questions. The 13 richly colored paintings in this show depict groups of women arranged in shallow, frieze-like compositions that resonate on both formal and mystical levels.

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Aria Dean: Facts Worth Knowing

Château Shatto, 540 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
September 14–October 26

Aria Dean examines how we ascribe meaning to art objects, and how those objects reflect and refract meaning back to us in turn. With Facts Worth Knowing, her second solo exhibition at Château Shatto, Dean focuses on the massive Babylonian sets from Intolerance (1916), D.W. Griffith’s sprawling historical epic made in part as a response to criticism that greeted his now-infamous film Birth of a Nation (1915). Abandoned in an East Hollywood lot shortly after filming, the set has been cited and emulated by a range of sources, from a Hollywood mall facade and Disney’s Hollywood Land theme park in Anaheim to the writings of Kenneth Anger and the L.A. Noire video game. Dean’s digitally fabricated sculptures engage with this web of references, occupying the liminal space between illusion and reality, authentic and ersatz.

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Samantha Yun Wall: Nothing to be afraid of

Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, 7424 Beverly Boulevard, Fairfax, Los Angeles
September 21–October 26

Samantha Yun Wall borrows from East Asian and Western myths and folktales to shape the subject matter of her haunting ink drawings. As a Black Korean immigrant, she also draws on her particular experiences with navigating identity, belonging, and otherness. With a palette of dense blacks, crisp whites, and moody grays, she depicts the outsiders, monsters, and witches — who are often women — from these cross-cultural parables, reimagining them as protagonists for the rejected, oppressed, and silenced.

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Lotus L. Kang: Azaleas

Commonwealth and Council, 3006 West 7th Street, Suite 220, Koreatown, Los Angeles
September 21–October 26

Lotus L. Kang does not create objects for viewing, per se, as much as poetic environments to be navigated physically and psychologically. Juxtaposing industrial and organic materials such as steel tubing, film strips, silicone, tatami mats, kelp, and anchovies, Kang conjures a nexus of autobiographical and cultural references, balanced between post-minimalist aesthetics and biological entropy. She often employs volatile elements like unfixed photographic paper and kimchi ingredients that suggest states of existence constantly in flux.

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Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us

Webber Gallery, 939 South Santa Fe Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles
September 14–November 30

The late Tee A. Corinne was an influential lesbian activist, photographer, and educator who depicted queer love, eroticism, and companionship with candor and freedom in an age when it was far from widely accepted. She shared her knowledge and enthusiasm by holding weeklong photography workshops, dubbed “Feminist Photography Ovulars,” at the Rootworks a lesbian commune in Southern Oregon from 1979 to 1983. A forest fire between us offers an overdue survey of her groundbreaking work, including graceful nudes, frank scenes of queer community, and radical images of female utopia.

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Arthur Jafa: nativemanson

Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles
September 14–December 14

Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa uses the archive as his medium, remixing, cutting, pasting, and reassembling a wide spectrum of still and moving images into biting commentaries on what it means to be Black in America. The centerpiece of his first solo gallery show in LA is BEN GAZARRA (2024), a revisionist cut of the climactic scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Jafa’s darkly comical intervention is more incendiary and racially charged than the original film.

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Tom Van Sant: An Earth Twin at the Digital Dawn

18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th Street, Santa Monica, California
September 7–February 1, 2025

Before Google Earth, there was GeoSphere. In 1988, Tom Van Sant began working on a pioneering digital model of our planet dubbed the GeoSphere Project. He collaborated with scientist Dr. L. Van Warren, combining thousands of satellite images to create an accurate representation of the Earth as seen from space. The project grew to include other elements, such as the Earth Situation Room, which mapped ecosystems and provided data on climate change. An Earth Twin at the Digital Dawn highlights how Van Sant’s work offered artists, scientists, and planners a vision of a geographically and ecologically interconnected Earth, years before the global adoption of the internet.