May 2023 events calendar for Los Angeles

The most boisterous musical you’ll find about divorces and beheadings, Six tells the story of the six wives of the 16th-century monarch Henry VIII as they each try to persuasively sing about who suffered the most. Our New York critic says that the snappy musical sees “the queens sing their heads off and the audience loses its mind.”

For dinner and a movie, all in one, just follow the food trucks. During the spring, summer and fall, Street Food Cinema throws together a series of outdoor parties—usually alfresco, sometimes in a drive-in format—that include screenings of some of our favorite movies, paired with an assortment of gourmet food trucks and even a live music performance from a cool local band. The screenings are held in venues across L.A. and alternate from week to week, so make sure to check the schedule. Some of the outdoor venues are dog-friendly, allowing you to bring your four-legged cinema lover along.

See more of this season’s outdoor movie screenings in L.A.

You can step inside a recreation of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s studio and see hundreds of items tied to the iconic neo-expressionist painter at the L.A. debut of this touring exhibition.

Local events producer Future Primitive has put together a lineup of house and techno acts for a series of shows in and around Downtown L.A. This summer’s slate includes Rumors (May 6), DJ Guy Gerber’s block party along Chinatown’s Gin Ling Way; All Day I Dream (May 20), DJ Lee Burridge’s party at Pershing Square; Paradise in the Park (June 3, 4), a two-day affair again in the DTLA park from DJ Jamie Jones; and the debut of Astra Club (July 15), a collaboration between DJ Tennis and Carlita in Chinatown.

We’re all kind of obsessed with the lighting in Southern California, but the local progenitors of the 1960s Light and Space movement really love it. LACMA has dug into its collections to pull out all sorts of reflective and refractive works: Fred Eversley’s contorted parabolic lens, Judy Chicago’s smooth pastel domes and Mary Corse’s reflective white grid among them (notably absent from the show: anything from James Turrell).

Listen to classical and jazz in a dome more than a mile above L.A. during this mountaintop concert series. The Mount Wilson Observatory is hosting monthly concerts this summer inside the dome of its 100-inch Hooker telescope, which was the largest telescope in the world for much of the first half of the 20th century.

Tickets cost $50 (that also includes access to the exhibit at the observatory) and it’s highly recommended that you buy them in advance since seating is limited. You’ll need to be able to climb 53 steps to reach the dome, and children under 12 aren’t permitted. 

With the verbal fury of Nicki Minaj and the fearless attitude of Joan Rivers, Wong made her name with her 2016 Netflix special Baby Cobra, which she performed seven months pregnant, taking on menstruation, Sheryl Sandberg and sex with Asian men.

Keith Haring’s colorful, energetic designs—like his barking dogs or crawling stick figure-like radiant baby—have moved well beyond the world of street art over the past four decades and ingrained themselves as instantly recognizable pieces of pop art. Now, the Broad will examine that body of work in a museum setting with this display of over 120 artworks and archival materials.

Pundits and politicians may cry wolf about censorship these days, but decades ago the government actually pushed the entertainment industry into blacklisting individuals due to their beliefs. In response to the 1947 testimonies in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hollywood responded to baseless accusations of Communism by adopting a blacklist of employees. This touring exhibition at the Skirball explores the proceedings, investigations, motives and choices of those involved, with a particular focus on the Jewish creatives and executives caught up in the process.

One of L.A.’s best free live music offerings, Jazz at LACMA has featured legit legends over its three-decade run at the museum. Seating for the program is available in the museum’s plaza on a first-come, first-served basis, though you’re welcome to picnic on the grass, too (you won’t really be able to see the show, but you’ll still hear it). You’ll find the series on Friday evenings in LACMA’s welcome plaza (just behind Urban Light) starting in April.

True to its name, Boat Cinema will once again present a mix of nautical-themed movie screenings (think: Jaws, Titanic) and decades-spanning fan favorites on the beach at Castaic Lake every Friday, Saturday and Sunday this summer.

If you’re the lucky owner of that pink-and-purple beach house in Santa Monica, you live out your Barbie-like dreams daily. But for the rest of us, we’ll have to settle for this themed pop-up a couple of blocks away at Santa Monica Place. The touring World of Barbie experience fills 20,000 square feet of space with rooms and photo ops inspired by the Mattel icon, including a life-size Barbie Dreamhouse, a full-size Barbie Camper Van, a salon, fashion studio, TV studio and movie theater.

Envisioned years before the pandemic but debuted in the throes of it, Detroit DJ Carl Craig’s Party/After-Party turned the basement of New York’s Dia Beacon into a cavernous, empty dance club with a sliver of flashing light sneaking through a doorway. The techno-heavy work makes the jump to the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, with a slate of live performances to accompany it.

See how the California abstract painter was influenced by the Japanese concept of “ma,” or negative space, at this LACMA exhibition. The show includes 60 works from the museum’s collection, a mix of Francis’s prints and paintings placed in the same space as traditional and contemporary Japanese works—including screens, calligraphy and stylistically-similar paintings.

The Hammer Museum has a ton of new exhibitions and spaces to show off this spring, including a new lobby, sculpture garden and a brand-new Wilshire-facing gallery. As for the museum’s existing main gallery, it’s been filled with “Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection,” which features more than 70 works from the likes of John Baldessari, Lee Bontecou, Mark Bradford, Simone Forti, Luchita Hurtado, Mike Kelley and Noah Purifoy, among others.

See 75 works by 42 women artists who live or were born in Islamic societies. The featured artists portray some shared concerns but via identities that are not exclusively “Middle Eastern”; they range in origin from Africa to Western, Central and Southern Asia to diasporic communities.

This touring photo exhibition focuses on four decades of work from Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems, who first met in Harlem in the 1970s and have remained friends ever since as each has tackled similar themes of race, power and representation through scenes rooted in the Black community.

Bountiful feasts and bowls of fruit have peppered the scenes of European artwork for centuries. But what do they actually say about the hunger, excess and sustenance of those times? And how has art impacted food trends? The Norton Simon examines all of these with 60 paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures from 1500 to 1900.

In 1973, to get back to England from Japan, David Bowie and his friend and bandmate Geoff MacCormack traveled through the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express. Culver City’s Wende Museum has MacCormack’s photos of their train voyage on display alongside footage from The Long Way Home, which includes additional footage.

One of L.A.’s most wonderful oddities, the Velaslavasay Panorama, is teaming up with Glendale’s Forest Lawn Museum for a show of grand paintings at the latter. You’ll find immersive, large-scale panoramas divided into three categories: the early history of panoramas, crucifixion panoramas and panoramas in Hollywood and Los Angeles.

If you’re sick of First Fridays only offering a high density of food trucks and lines at your favorite dive bars, check out something old—in a good way, we promise—at the Natural History Museum, where First Fridays offer dinosaurs and DJs. The first Friday of every month from February through June plays host to a KCRW-presented evening of music, allowing visitors of all ages to stay late for a night at the museum. Each month offers a different lineup of musical guests and DJs, guided museum tours, and scientist-led talks. Check out the museum’s website for advance tickets and updates on info.

See five decades’ worth of prints that express both outrage and optimism during this activism-inspired show at the Vincent Price Art Museum. Sixty of the objects on display come from LACMA’s collection, while VPAM has four of its own prints by California-based artists from the Chicano Moratorium and early Asian American activism.

This traveling exhibition celebrates a loose group of artists who came together in 1938 in New Mexico, linked by an inclination toward spiritually heightened abstraction. If you’ve day tripped into the deserts near L.A., you’re probably already familiar with a certain mystical quality among the artwork there, and the canvases here conjure that vibe—but decades earlier. You’ll see colorful geometric paintings that mix bold, colorful lines with pastel backgrounds (the homages to Wassily Kandinsky are particularly obvious if you’ve just come from LACMA’s modern galleries). The exhibition is broken up by artist with a focus on painters Raymond Jonson, Emil Bisttram, Agnes Pelton and Lawren Harris. While you’re there, make sure to venture into the adjoining gallery—an unrelated exhibition, to be clear—to see some remarkable lacquer works from East Asia.

Nature lovers rejoice! Spend a day at the Natural History Museum’s Butterfly Pavilion, which will open from March 5 through August 13 with up to 30 butterfly and moth species and an assortment of California plants. The seasonal outdoor exhibit allows for adults and children alike to witness nature up close—we’re talking having bufferlies take flight and land on your arms or shoulders. Prime time for these unique butterfly flight experiences are between 10 and 11am each morning.

Think Cinco de Mayo is like any other holiday? Think again—in this town, the fifth of May is a citywide celebration.

Take full advantage of the three-day weekend and pack it full of food and time outdoors.