LA Art Show’s 2026 Edition Includes New Latin American Pavilion

Posted on by Diversions LA

The LA Art Show returns to the Los Angeles Convention Center January 7–11, 2026, marking its 31st edition as the city’s largest and longest-running art fair. Privately owned and independently operated, the fair has long been a major part of Los Angeles’s cultural calendar, both due to its curatorially passion and its international scope, which is even more in play this year with the addition of the show’s new Latin American Pavilion.

The event is led once again by director and producer Kassandra Voyagis, and will present over 100 global exhibitors for this year’s event.  Tickets are available at www.laartshow.com, with 15 percent of all proceeds benefiting the American Heart Association’s Life is Why™ campaign.

Always an adventure in art, this year’s fair introduces a number of firsts.  Dublin’s Oliver Sears Gallery becomes the first gallery from Ireland to participate in the fair, while fresh fFrom London’s West End, Pontone Gallery will showcase works by self-taught Manchester artist and former professional rock drummer Chris Rivers, an artist whose vivid and surreal paintings and hand-gilded editions include elements of astronomy, mythology, and celestial mapping.

Also new on the exhibitor list are first-time participants including Gefen Gallery (San Francisco), Steidel Contemporary (Lake Worth), and Corridor Contemporary (Tel Aviv). Also present will be ten plus South Korean galleries, and longtime participant Rehs Galleries of New York, which has exhibited at the fair since 1994.

Other galleries include Switzerland’s LICHT FELD Gallery, presenting the first public showing in over four decades of Karl A. Meyer’s 1980s woodcut prints, and Corridor Contemporary, which is offering a major presentation of cinematic figurative works by Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri. Korean gallery J&J Art will feature Elegant Freedom, a presentation of Hanji-based works by Jinny Suh which reinterpret Korean tradition through a contemporary lens. Artifact NYC will be showing a wide range of art, including abstract neon by Los Angeles artist Linda Sue Price; at ALOV Gallery, work will include that of LA’s Gay Summer Rick.

 

And of course, this year’s fair has a must-see in the debut of an invitation-only Latin American Pavilion, curated by Marisa Caichiolo, long-time and continued curator of the LA Art Show’s signature non-commerical platform DIVERSEartLA. Recently selected to co-curate Chile’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Caichiolo brings her usual nuanced perspective here, focusing on themes of memory, migration, identity, and provenance. The the pavilion includes work by both emerging and established artists from across Latin America, exemplifying this extremely charged moment in time internationally and nationally. The pavilion focuses on the geography and resilience of the Latin American culture and art grounded within the discource of contemporary art.

“At a moment when immigration issues continue to disproportionately impact Latin American communities, it is especially important to provide a platform for these artists,” Caichiolo asserts.

The 2026 edition of the curator’s DIVERSEartLA is equally timely, titled The Biennials, Art Institutions and Museums in the Contemporary Art Ecosystem. Offering a living examination of how contemporary art circulates and evolves through global biennials and institutional frameworks, on exhibit will be work by the Gwangju Biennial (Korea), Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), NYLAAT Triennial (New York), SACO Biennial (Chile), and NoMade Biennial, among others, all exploring the productive tensions of these events and institutions.

Biennials, with their experimental and time-sensitive nature, often act as laboratories for new ideas and social critique, while museums and institutions provide a focus on more long-term stewardship. Both help to sustain both public engagement with art, and artistic innovation – which are also both served well by the LA Art Show itself.

This year there is a special focus on the ways in which geography, local communities, and site-specific conditions shape artistic production and curatorial strategies. Along with exciting new art and the opportunity to view works by art masters such as Chagall and Picasso, visitors will experience unique projects that emphasize care and sustainable, collective action, and are tied directly to contemporary social and political realities.

In short, this is an important and vital exhibition, promising new visions and fresh, exciting art, as well as a great venue for art buying and browsing.

LA Art Show 2026 takes place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa Street, Los Angeles. Tickets start at $40.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by LA Art Show 2026

 

 

The LA Art Show Celebrates 30 Years

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The LA Art Show Celebrates 30 Years by Genie Davis

The LA Art Show is returning to the Los Angeles Convention Center to mark its 30th anniversary. The first major art show in LA is now back with over 100 galleries from every corner of the globe, including Switzerland’s Licht Feld Gallery, the U.K.’s Columbia Road Gallery, Ukraine’s Snisarenko Gallery, and South Korea’s Art in Dongsan, as well as exhibitors from the U.S. such as the Coral Gallery in Miami, and closer to home Santa Monica’s Copro, Bruce Lurie,  and Building Bridges Art Exchange, as well as the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

DIVERSEartLA will also be back, curated as it has been for the last eight years by Marisa Caichiolo, and this year showincasing a variety of projects affiliated with DIVERSEartLA since its beginning. DIVERSEartLA arose from the necessity to raise the voices of and amplify marginalized perspectives, and continues to be one of the most compelling and innovative experiences in the large-scale exhibition space.

According to Caichiolo, “Visitors can look forward to an engaging display that highlights pivotal moments through videos of performances and installations from each year.” Her curatorial vision of diversity and inclusion also serves this year as an important reminder that artists and art lovers alike must stay active and engaged with securing and sustaining their rights.

Caichiolo notes “This retrospective, which feels particularly important right now, honors the creative contributions of our partners while emphasizing the vibrant evolution of DIVERSE as a vital presence in the art community.” Artists and institutes included in this year’s exhibition include a special institution focusing on diversity and pride from MOLAA, in collaboration with renowned Argentinian artists Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone.

Other DIVERSEartLA highlights include Carlos Martiel’s Cauce/Riverbed, exploring the deep challenges faced by
immigrants in California and throughout the country; and Viktor Freso’s enormous and exciting 30-foot Bear Sculpture presented by Slovakia’s Danubiana Museum, and serving as a symbol of power and resilience.

Los Angeles-area artist Robert Vargas will be back at the event, creating an enormous live mural, “Heroes,” during the Opening Night event. The mural, which will be on display throughout the exhibition, will be designed to serve as a heartfelt tribute to the first responders who continue to serve the city, standing as a symbol of hope and perseverance in the face of the recent fire disasters.

In addition, LA-based Building Bridges Art Exchange will showcase art from those artists who have lost their homes and studios in the fires, with all proceeds from that showcase going to support them.

The decision to proceed with the LA Art Show this year was in fact made in support of LA’s creative community in the aftermath of the recent fires. The exhibition’s director and producer Kasssandra Voyagis says that “As LA’s longest-running art fair, our mission is unequivocal: to champion the artists and galleries that constitute our cultural landscape…[we have] a resolute commitment to aid in the healing and rebuilding efforts while offering much-needed community support and reprieve.”

The LA Art Show runs February 19th through 23rd at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Tickets are available at www.laartshow.com with 15% of proceeds being donated to the life-saving mission of American Heart Association’s Life is WhyTM campaign.

Free entry to the fair is available February 20-23 for firefighters and their families as a thank-you for their efforts on behalf of all Angelenos in the recent and cataclysmic fires throughout our region. The LA Art Show has also donated to California Community Foundation in support of wildfire relief and provides event attendees with the option to do the same when they purchase tickets.

Stay tuned to this space for coverage of the event as well as other art programs during February’s LA Art Week – beginning with as always, our own homegrown LA Art Show.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the LA Art Show

Take Your Sweet-art to the LA Art Show Opening February 14th

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With exhibiting gallery spaces from New York to New Mexico, the U.K. to Peru, the LA Art Show roars into the Los Angeles Convention Center from February 14 to 18. Along with the enormous mix of galleries – over 120 of them –  offering a far reaching collection of mediums and artists, there are a variety of other offerings to engage attendees.

Among the standouts this year are 7 participating non-commerical art institutions exhibiting in DIVERSEartLA.  Exciting solo projects  explore the intersection of memory, humanity, and AI. These include:

The Museum of Art and History in Lancaster with the lustrous multi-media work of Osceola Refetoff, “Repairing the Future,”  focusing on global sea level rise. The work includes a large-scale immersive projection of the artist’s 8-minute film Sea of Change shot by Refetoff in Svalbard, Norway, near the North Pole. His visuals are paired with those of NASA satellites and AI-generated animation of possible future climate outcomes. The original soundtrack is written and performed by award-winning composer Paul Cantelon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a performance from Hibiscus TV artists Kaye Freeman and Amy Kaps on February 17.

The Nevada Museum of Art presents “The Journey” by contemporary artist Guillermo Bert, curated by Vivian Zavataro. The installation features a series of 20 highly-detailed, life-sized wood sculptures of actual immigrants employed as frontline workers. Bert’s multimedia work explores how ancient traditions and modern technology merge to create narratives of
identity, human memory, immigration, culture, and humanity.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá offers “Mythstories” by multimedia artist Carlos Castro Arias and curated by Gustavo Adolfo Ortiz Serrano. Appropriating the style and iconography of medieval tapestry, Castro uses anachronisms and the re-
contextualization of found objects to create connections across times and cultures. His work experiments with myth, history, and AI, and explores individual and collective identity.

MUSA Museum of Art University of Guadalajara, Grodman Legacy and Guadalajara Foundation (Mexico) presents “Fake Memory of a True Past” curated by Moises Schiaffino. This project seeks to create a reflection on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to generate a historical archive. This video installation tells the same story from two different visions: the human and the artificial, making a visual comparison of the memory that the human being has preserved with the one that, through algorithms, the AI ​​has generated.

AAL Museum (Santiago, Chile) is exhibiting the visual narrative, “Be Water” from contemporary artist, Antuan. The immersive installation explores the significance of this vital element with Antuan’s creation of the Human Net, a human geometric structure,
symbolizing the symmetry of the universe. The characters within represent humanity’s urgent need to address the global water crisis, highlighting the essential collaboration between humanity and AI to create a new network of human consciousness.

Raubtier Unicus Productions (Los Angeles) presents “Bridging Emotional and Digital Landscapes,” exploring the intersection of human emotion and advanced technology to create a digital mural of individual and collective experiences. The audience engages with a touchscreen to input words or phrases that resonate with their memories. Through the utilization of AI-driven word-to-image conversion, tangible printing, and large-scale projections, the evolving correlation between personal memories and their emotional and physical manifestations is revealed.

Red Line Contemporary Art Center (Denver, Colorado) presents Laleh Mehran’s “Entropic Systems,” an immersive installation that considers the politicization of ideologies. In this work, a drawing machine inscribes a sort of memory into the mineral bed, much like a rudimentary hard drive. Each day the past is erased, but at the same time, the grains will never sit the same again, containing remains of history much in the way that AI is trained with billions of words and yet “remembers” none of them.

Celebrating Black History Month, the Tanya Weddemire Gallery will exhibit four pioneering black artists, exploring a range of themes, including identity, culture and resilience.  LP Gallery from South Korea will feature renowned artist Dain Yoon known for painting on her skin to create surreal self-portraits that trick the eye with 3D shading.

LA’s own Fabrik Projects Gallery  welcomes The Soul of Your City exhibition, the culmination of a global photography competition aimed at capturing the hidden spirit and true identity of cities through the lenses of local photographers.

The Young Masters Art Prize, presented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, represents an international initiative committed to supporting emerging talents from diverse backgrounds, with strong representation of female-identifying artists in 75% of the works.

In a new collaboration, the LA Art Show, Expanded Learning (EXL) and Athletes for Life (AFL) Foundation—founded by former NFL running back Greg Bell– launch the Southern California Art ‘n the Schools Art Contest, inviting SoCal students to submit their artwork. The result should be fresh and exciting.

Finally, opening night attendees take note: “We’re grateful to Lucy Hale for joining us as the official host of the 2024 LA Art Show Opening Night Premiere Party,”  Kassandra Voyagis, LA Art Show Producer and Director has announced. “Ms. Hale’s support
and influence will encourage and inspire a new generation of art collectors and shine light on the important work of the American Heart Association, which funds research that improves health outcomes for heart disease and stroke patients as well as supports lifesaving CPR education.”

Hale herself adds “It’s an honor to host the 2024 LA Art Show Opening Night Premiere Party and bring further awareness
to a beautiful evening that unites the importance of art, culture and philanthropy. On a personal note, I couldn’t be more excited to celebrate Valentine’s Day with the American Heart Association whose mission touches people all across the world.”
Lucy was introduced to the LA Art Show by its inaugural charity beneficiary, the American Heart Association, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year.

And, speaking of heARTfelt love – this publication will publish opening night photos of LA Art Show later this week.

For tickets to the event, visit here.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by LA Art Show

 

LA Art Show: Stunning Video Art and International Galleries

Posted on by Diversions LA

The LA Art Show is the oldest art fair to occupy Los Angeles’ burgeoning fair season, and it is still a vital presence. This year, the 28th iteration of the fair, produced by Kassandra Voyagis, offers abundant highlights including works from six Japanese galleries, a variety of work from 14 South Korean galleries and artists, and the return of the European Pavilion.

The work in DIVERSEartLA, curated by Marisa Caichiolo provides a variety of haunting video installations that are as lush and captivating as they are prescient social commentary on global climate change. In conjunction, the Mueum of Latin American Art offers work from Judy Baca; AMA showcases the work of Mexican photographic artist Alfredo De Stefano.

Baca’s double-sided triptych “Thirteen Women in the Volcanic Eruption” (Side 1) created on acyrlic on wood panels, a part of MOLAA’s permanent collection explores the worship of a female goddess. The second side, on display as we visited, is a visionary look at Mother Earth, “The Birth of the Vision of the Heart,” above.

Immigration policies and the heartbreak of border crossings is the topic of an exhibition that combines video images with the clothes worn by immigrants in “Uninhabited,” an installation from Carmen Isasi.

With a sand covered floor and gorgeous images and sound, De Stefano’s “The Pulse of Silence (El Pulso del silencio)” is an absolute must-see exploring our planet, its future, and the terrible poetry of its possible demise.

Davis Birk’s work is equally fascinating, nature through a surveillance camera in “Project: Rendevous: Esta tierra es Mi Tierra.”

Petro Eiko’s riveting 3D sculptures are also rooted in an exploration of climate change and fragile state of water; she uses six 3D sculptures and video to create a mysterious and involving installation.

Curated by Beate Dusterberg, viewers can walk through a series of cylindrical metal sculptures containing images of eyes and bodies, illuminated by an eerie, glowing white light. Both futuristic and cautionary, the experience is otherworldly.

Artist Robert Vargas created a mural on site opening night, expressing the plight of missing indigenous women.

“IL GIARDINO PLANETARIO (The Planetary Garden)” from artist Pietro Rufflo collaborating with Noruwei, provides a prescient look at earth as a garden with haunting visual images.

At Building Bridges Art Exchange, an amazing cocoon of softly falling fabric provides a walk-in experience that evokes memories of a visit to Antelope Canyon. Other sculptural pieces are also on exhibit from the miraculous hand of artist Carmen Mardónez.

At the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, hauntingly luminous paintings by Laurence Jones were standouts, evocative of Los Angeles life both remote and glamorous. Luminous in an entirely different way, the works at Taguchi Fine Art by artist Regine Schumann utilize glowing flurorescent acrylic glass. Hayoon Jay Lee offers fascinatingly textile work that looks like feathers but is actually crated using rice, modeling paste, and acrylic on wood panel. The works were featured at Artego Gallery. More locally, Melissa Morgan shows off the futuristic glass, LED, and steel work of Anthony James among its sculptural offerings.

At the Los Angeles Center for Photography space, a bevy of fine work shines, including poignant, hauntingly delicate cynotypes from artist Cathy Immordino; works by Carolee Friday and Sarah Hadley were also lovely.

Hung Viet Nguyen at bG, above

At bG Gallery, a series of lush works with a lavendar edged palette from Susan Lizotte were joined by a wide variety of works including the charming dog sculptures from Alessandra Pierelli, witty ceramic cats and dogs from Linda Smith, and masterful California seascapes and skyscapes from Gay Summer Rick. Hung Viet Nguyen’s splendid, deeply textural Sacred Landscape series was also included in the exhibition space, along with abstract cyanotypes from Richard S. Chow, among many other outstanding works.

Over at Fabrik Projects, Nancy’s Wise’s oil on aluminum flowers bloomed vividly; the gallery is also showing works from actor and artist Val Kilmer. Fabrik is also behind the massive sculptural work, “Launch Intention” a mega metal paper airplane in design, from  artist Griffin Loop, seen above. Thematically, the work stands as a call to action; visually it is an inventive geometric stunner.

At Art in Bloom, astonishing works from Britney Penouilh and Angela Izzo include the Mystical Creatures Tarot Deck,  Penoullh’s exceptional clay sculpture cast in resin, “Gothic Altarpiece,” (above) and more.

EK Gallery, features the work of Chuni Park, (above) with perfect and precise images of nature.Ukrainian artist Denis Sarazhin offers beautifully crafted work at Arcadia Contemporary, whose gallerist, Steve Diamant, was able to secure the artist a safe place to work in the U.S. as the war wages between Ukraine and Russia.

The Maria Elena Kravitz gallery shone with bright and gorgeous images from Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja, Peter Zelle, and Mark Davis among the artworks that compel with textures and patterns. Touchon Gallery’s evocative underwater photographic works from Alex Sher were a rewarding deep dive.

Throughout the exhibition, viewers will find a variety of awesome surprises such as whimsical and delightful plexiglass image-shaped letters hanging from the ceiling in the wonderful “Raintype: Lorenzo Marini” (above) presented by Bruce Lurie Gallery, which also exhibits the work of painter Michael Gorman.

Around one corner, “Shai Kremer: The Edge of Knowledge, ” a photographic lightbox; around another, hyperrealistic scultpural works from Carole A. Feuerman startle and delight at Markowicz Fin Arts; in other spots, viewers will find sinuous metalic figures prance while brightly colored strongmen and super heroes flex their muscles.  Red aliens, sardine can sculptures with video installations, Chagall reinterpreted on fabric, a deconstructed typewriter: it’s all there, and it’s all well worth seeing.

Tickets to the event, running Thursday through Sunday are available for purchase here. Don’t miss. LA Art Show is the longest running art fair in the region for a reason – it’s good.

  • Genie Davis; photos – Genie Davis