January 2027 events calendar for Los Angeles

Co-organized with Warner Bros. Archives, this immersive exhibition explores the world-building of Ryan Coogler’s record-breaking and Oscar-winning film Sinners. Centered around the film’s iconic Club Juke sequence, it uses music as an ancestral thread to trace Black cultural memory and the Great Migration from the Mississippi Delta to California. Featured artifacts include original film costumes for Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke and Stack, the Club Juke sign and Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore’s guitar. On your way out, stop by the interactive installation “Sounds That Carry Us,” where visitors can reflect on their own musical memories.

You might have seen ads on Instagram over the past couple of months for Hospital of Emotions—a colorful, cartoony flyer that heralds a site-specific art pop-up located in a real hospital with the tagline “a place to heal your heART.” The conceit intrigued me off the bat: 70 artists (both local and international) given hospital rooms as a canvas to transform as they wished. Hospital of Emotions ads are also referring to it as “the experience of the year.” We’re only in May so that’s still TBD, but I do think the exhibition—which is inhabiting the former St. Vincent Medical Center in Westlake and is officially open to the public as of May 27—is well worth your time. While the entire experience is hospital-themed—you walk through a waiting room and are given an intake form and hospital wristband, employees are in doctors’ coats—it’s not the cheesy type of immersive exhibition (read: selfie factory) that you might expect. Instead you’ll find 80 rooms filled with thought-provoking, visually dazzling and, yes, eminently photogenic installations. But there’s both style and substance here. And though the tickets are definitely on the pricey side, there’s so much to see—I spent nearly two hours there during my visit—that it (almost) makes up for it. The rooms are organized by theme; you start at the top of the building in the “Resilience Department” and make your way through clusters of rooms inspired by feelings like joy, sadness, anger, grief, fear and hope. The emphasis on...

The Natural History Museum stays up late this holiday season with the debut of this illuminated experience. NightTales will place projections and glowing installations, feauturing works from local artist Maggie West, across some of the museum’s indoor and outdoor areas.

Bathe in the neon glow of bygone bowling alley signage as Glendale’s Museum of Neon Art tells the story of the postwar rise of bowling alleys in Southern California. In addition to pieces of neon, “Wonder Lanes: The Signs and Style of Mid Century Bowling” includes a documentary and bowling memorabilia, with a specific focus on five midcentury local lanes: Covina Bowl, Long Beach’s Java Lanes, South Gate’s Arena Bowl, Crenshaw’s Holiday Bowl, Anaheim’s Wonder Bowl and Glendale’s Grand Central Bowl.

Right in time for Halloween season, the Academy Museum seeks to answer the question “Why do horror films matter so deeply to so many?” in this immersive look at the genre whose cultural cachet is always increasing. Knowingly employing horror tropes and exploring the lasting appeal of scary movies, the show is divided into six subcategories of horror—gothic, psychological, science, slasher, religion and ghosts. Expect re-creations of iconic settings where visitors will encounter creatures, monsters and objects from their favorite horror flicks and, in typical Academy fashion, a behind-the-scenes look at the storytelling and production processes of films from the original Frankenstein to The Shining to Get Out. After revisiting nearly every horror title (and slasher mask) you can think of, there’s only one way out of the exhibition—and it drops you into the middle of your own scary movie. At the end of a long hallway, you’ll find the Blood Room, a disconcertingly realistic re-creation of a slasher’s crime scene, with fake blood covering the walls and pooling onto the floor. The show is sure to be a huge hit with horror aficionados. And if you’re a horror hater? Well, according to Academy Museum President Amy Homma, you just haven’t found your horror yet. By splitting the genre into six wide-ranging categories, the exhibition shows that what qualifies as a horror movie isn’t one-size-fits-all. So if you, say, can’t handle anything with a ghost (guilty), you might be drawn...

Admire suspended sheets of textiles—including the metallic ones that would be incorporated into the curtains at the new David Geffen Galleries—along with colorful sketches and a recreation of Tokyo store NUNO at LACMA’s showcase of pioneering textile designer Reiko Sudō.

Ponyo loves Sosuke! And we love this exhibition at the Academy Museum dedicated to the wholesome Hayao Miyazaki film. Studio Ghibli donated more than 100 objects to the Academy Collection, and you’ll find everything from an animation desk to colorful art boards to dozens of frame-by-frame pencil drawings of the scene when Sosuke first finds Ponyo. Though you may recognize a couple of items from the museum’s debut Hayao Miyazaki retrospective, the vast majority of Ponyo pieces are new—and some have never been displayed in North America before. It’s also a colorful and super kid-friendly exhibition; you can watch clips of the gorgeously hand-drawn movie, recreate the wave-running scene and even make your own stop-motion animation. You’ll find it on the museum’s second floor, inside the first few galleries of the “Stories of Cinema’ space.

“Let’s hang out at the Pier” is something Santa Monica locals probably say next to never, but this monthly series is trying to change that. Every third Thursday from September to May, you’ll find everything from live music to storytelling to a classic car show on the Santa Monica Pier, all free to attend. 

“Somehow it’s a happier ending than I thought it would be—it felt so bleak,” Tacita Dean says of crafting this tribute to the then-fading format of analog film back in 2011. But now in the year of The Odyssey, Dean’s commission for the Tate Modern—restaged here at the Marciano Art Foundation’s cavernous theater gallery—feels like a triumphant touting of film’s resurgence: An 11-minute-long collage (all of the cutouts were achieved in camera) plays out on a vertically-oriented reel of 35mm film. Make sure to head up to the mezzanine viewpoint to peek into the projection booth. The show coincides with Pierre Leguillon’s selection of old advertisements that feature prominent artists promoting commercial brands, with presentations created for both the ground-floor library and the second-floor gallery.

Do you get a little thrill every time you go to the Beverly Hills Hotel? You have architect Paul R. Williams to thank, even if you might not know the name. This exhibition at the USC Fisher Museum of Art aims to fix that. “Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered” specifically spotlights the visionary architect’s multifamily housing projects through original drawings, photographs and plans, juxtaposed with new commissions by contemporary artists and architects. The message is clear: Williams didn’t just shape Los Angeles; he imagined a more livable version of it, one gorgeous building at a time. Complementary Williams exhibitions at LACMA and the Getty Center will open later in the year.