Women Around Town by Karen Schifman
August 2026
Don’t miss SCWCA’s exhibit, A Place at the Table, at TAG Gallery. A Place at the Table is inspired by the landmark feminist installation, The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago (1974-79). Our organization, in its 50 years of supporting women artists invited its members to take a well-deserved place at the table of art history for this installation. Women artists have been forever striving to be equally treated and recognized for their contributions. Here, 30 artists have each created an individual place setting that speaks to their art practice, individuality and spirit. Additionally, the walls of this gallery are graced with two-dimensional works that also provide each female-identified artist a place at the table of art history. Striving for inclusion should not be taken lightly as that struggle continues in our patriarchal society. The exhibit runs from August 8 thru August 29. Opening reception, August 8, 5-8 p.m.
The artist talk will be on closing day, August 29, 10:30-1:00. (Here’s a sneak peek at part of my piece.)
Congratulations to pioneering artist and film director Cheri Gaulke, and the magnificent film she created, Acting Like Women. The film screened at the Getty last Sunday to great acclaim. It is groundbreaking in the way it documented performance art and the historical importance of the Women’s Building. In the film, she takes us on a personal journey into the history of feminist performance art in 1970’s-80’s Los Angeles. Gaulke and her community forge a new kind of activist art that paves the way for art and social justice movements of today. Will keep you posted on the next local screening. 
I would like to bring to your attention two new museums in Los Angeles that may be of interest to you. The first, Dataland is already open. It’s the world’s first Museum of AI Arts and digital ecosystems, specializing in data visualization and AI-based creativity. It is located downtown on Grand Ave., it pairs nicely with a visit to MOCA and the Broad.
Next is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening September 22, 2026 (advance tickets are on sale now). The Lucas Museum explores how narrative art shapes our world—expressing beliefs, communicating values, expanding imagination, and inviting conversation. You will find Lucas’s film archives, and comics, and lots of narrative art ranging from Norman Rockwell to Frida Kahlo and Charles White. It will certainly be a topic of conversation in the coming months.
IN THE GALLERIES
We mourn the passing of beloved artist Betye Saar.
Roberts Projects presents Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, an exhibition exploring the central role of costume design in Saar’s early career and throughout her life as a mother and artist. The archivally-driven exhibition features over 200 objects, including costume designs, photographs, drawings, garments, jewelry, artworks and historic materials from the 1950s–1970s. Anchored by Saar’s costume designs, Let’s Get It On brings together for the first time a collection of newly-discovered photographs documenting early productions at the Inner City Cultural Center (ICCC)—a multicultural performing arts institution founded in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion—presented alongside the original sketches she created for those very performances. Saar’s work as a fine artist evolved radically throughout the years covered in Let’s Get It On, underlining how some of her most canonical works in assemblage—such as Black Girl’s Window (1969) and The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)—were deeply informed by and indebted to this unique moment in her life. Thru August 22, 2026.
A large and compelling group exhibition currently on view at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art . Us: Immigration and Diaspora in America, as Seen and Felt by Its Artists, juried by Peter Frank, examines the enduring realities of migration, identity, and belonging through the work of more than 100 artists. Rather than functioning as a straightforward political statement, Us presents a nuanced and deeply personal exploration of diaspora. The exhibition argues less for the free movement of people than for the recognition of the distinct histories, cultures, and identities that migrants carry with them. Each work contributes to a larger conversation about what it means to belong while honoring the individuality of its maker. Among the many artists in the exhibit are: Nurit Avesar, Pennie Fien, Ruth Gonzales, Shelley Heffler, Diane Holland, Sandra Lauterbach, Nancy Mooslin, Cecilia Orozco, Doni Silver Simons, and Jill Simons.
(image by Pennie Fien)
Continuing at Craig Krull Gallery are 2 noteworthy exhibitions of women artists this month. Jean Lowe: Say it with Flowers draws upon the Golden Age of Dutch floral still life paintings and Holly Roberts: Witness where she explores the place of animals in our imagination, Thru August 29, 2026.
Also continuing is Persona Works is a solo exhibition of recent paintings by South Korean artist Moka Lee at David Kordansky Gallery. Thru August 22, 2026.
IN THE MUSEUMS
I finally had the opportunity to visit the new LACMA Galleries and naturally I have a lot to say and more to think about. I do want to point out that I noticed the following women artists with works in the current installation: Judy Chicago, Margaret White Bourke, Betye Saar, Mary Cassatt, and Ruth Asawa. Likely there were a few more and I will make careful notes when I return. For those of you who have not seen the new galleries, I will point out that there is a lot of material culture on view, ie. vessels, boxes, furnishings, pots, etc.-exquisite pieces that were not highlighted in the past. To see paintings you need to look for the small exhibition rooms. More on that to come…
Betye Saar, I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break
There are two noteworthy exhibits at the Craft Contemporary. The first is part of Craft Contemporary’s Clay Biennial series, tierra marks a reconsideration of the biennial’s conceptual and material parameters as this exhibit features works that treat clay as more than a material, tierra expands its lens to explore artist practices deeply rooted in land, earth, and relationship. The artists in tierra approach the earth as a holder of culture memory, a site of living knowledge and and active partner in creation. By moving past the technical limits of ceramics, the exhibition focuses on how artists work with and through the earth, transforming a physical medium into a profound relationship. “tierra foregrounds the work of Latinx, Indigenous, and Black artists whose practices reflect emotional, familial, and cultural connections to land. Within these works, earth often appears as ancestor, relative, or teacher; a deep-time relationship shaped through kinship rather than ownership. Lineages emerge through matriarchal and ancestral histories, where making stewards knowledge across generations and geographies.” Exhibition artists include Jackie Amézquita, Natalia Arbelaez, Syd Carpenter, Teresa Castro, Armando Guadalupe Cortés, rafa esparza, Miguel Fernández de Castro, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Karla García, Christine Howard Sandoval, Joanna Keane Lopez, Ruben Olguin, Iman Person, Jeri Redcorn. Thru October 25, 2026.
Also at the museum is Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth is a courtyard installation led by Liz Gálvez (Office e.g.) that stages mass and fiber as shared infrastructures for collective comfort in the Los Angeles summer. Building on the practice’s ongoing investigation into heat resilience and material experimentation by staging thermal infrastructures as architectural and civic propositions, the project adapts passive cooling strategies from desert contexts into the M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard. Thru October 25, 2026.
Betye Saar’s large-scale work Drifting Toward Twilight continues on view at the The Huntington. This is a commissioned site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds. On view through November 2027.
The following are all continuing exhibitions.
The American Quilt: Cloth and Commerce at the Bowers Museum, Thru August 30, 2026.
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at The Broad Museum. Thru October Thru 11, 2026.
Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity at LACMA. Thru October 12, 2026.
Laura Aguilar: Body and Landscape at The Huntington. Thru September 7, 2026.
Positive Fragmentation at the Long Beach Museum of Art includes over 180 prints drawn from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, each a work by a contemporary artist who employs fragmentation in different ways. The list of artists is quite impressive: Polly Apfelbaum, Jennifer Bartlett, Christiane Baumgartner, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Ellen Gallagher, Jenny Holzer , Nicola Lopez, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Morris, Wangechi Mutu, Judy Pfaff, Wendy Red Star, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Swoon, Barbara Takenaga, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker. (Image by Wendy Red Star). Thru September 27, 2026..
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