Things to do in Los Angeles on Sunday

The masters of alfresco rooftop movie viewing have returned for another season of screenings to LEVEL in Downtown L.A. Known for excellent film choices and a steady supply of snacks and booze, Rooftop Cinema Club is your snazzy, comfortable and less stressful alternative to other outdoor movie screenings. You don’t even need to bring your own camping chair—Rooftop Cinema Club provides you with your very own comfy lawn chair (with optional blankets for purchase to up the coziness). And instead of listening to the movie over loudspeakers, you’ll get a set of wireless headphones so you never have to miss a word. Find the full schedule on their site, or in our outdoor movie calendar.

Every Sunday you can find dozens of food vendors at this market at ROW DTLA, with a mix of much-loved pop-ups and future foodie stars. Look out for this year’s new vendors, including Basket Taco Co, Battambong Barbecue and Taste of the Pacific.

Two documentarians of Chicano culture—iconic black-and-white photographer Estevan Oriol and the former Teen Angels magazine—put the spotlight on L.A.’s art, lowrider and tattoo culture in this Beyond the Streets exhibition.

It’s more than just the low clearance: This exhibition at the Petersen explores the custom paint, engraving, upholstery and, of course, the gravity-defying suspension of the lowrider scene. In addition to iconic cars, the exhibit spotlights influential artists in the Chicano lowrider art scene. Even if you have no interest in cars, this colorful showcase of 20-plus lowered cars and bikes is excellent: The candy-colored paint jobs are dazzling, and the craftsmanship of the customizations—many vehicles are on display with their engines and undercarriages visible—is remarkable. You’ll learn a little bit of history here, how the “low and slow” movement is rooted in the postwar Mexican American zoot suit counterculture, but largely this is an excuse to ogle some L.A. automotive icons.

Hollywood’s Japan House has tapped artist Sebastian Masuda to dive into the roots of all things cute and colorful with this exhibition on Japanese kawaii culture. The free show includes multiple pieces and installations from Masuda.

Move through a suite of sci-fi installations that depict a world overcome by rising seas and unchecked capitalism in this exhibition from Josh Kline. The MOCA Grand Avenue show includes a mix of sculpture, photography, moving images and ephemeral materials.

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 $60 (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. 

Best known for her rhinestone-studded paintings of Black women, collages of old Jet Magazine spreads and revisions of historic paintings, Thomas’s large-scale works (80 of them from the past two decades) are on display at the Broad. The Downtown museum’s transportive exhibition includes recreations of the elaborate tableaus that Thomas often poses her models in—including a pair of scenes of her mother’s New Jersey home that start the exhibition. Those intimate details run throughout, including in a living room-like lounge in the show’s largest gallery, as well as stacks of books from Black feminist and queer writers that’ve been placed throughout. Swing by on Thursday evenings for free entry, but on any other day, the exhibition is absolutely worth the $22 cost of entry.

Oof. Honk. Spam. Ed Ruscha’s laconic canvases are familiar fixtures for L.A. museumgoers, and LACMA has brought them all together in this major, floor-filling retrospective. Ruscha’s background in commercial art is evident in the big, bold text that draws your attention in his earliest Pop art paintings. But so too is his fascination with urbanism and infrastructure: the vibrant colors and sharp angles of his Standard station paintings, the black-and-white shapes of his catalog of L.A. apartments, the mesmerizing aerial shots of some of L.A.’s largest parking lots and his meticulous photos of the Sunset Strip. The retrospective also presents the opportunity to see the fiery painting Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire on display at LACMA for the first time ever, as well as a reconstruction of his Chocolate Room (which, yes, is a distinct-smelling room made out sheets upon sheets of chocolate).

Ready or not, spooky season is slowly stalking its way ever closer. The clearest sign? Universal Studios has announced its haunted houses set inhabit its Hollywood-adjacent theme park for Halloween Horror Nights. A Quiet Place will be getting its own haunted house at Universal Studios Hollywood this year (as well as the theme park’s Orlando location). Specifically, the attraction will take inspiration from the first two films in the series, so expect more silent dread and less city destruction à la the recent Day One. You’ll travel through the Abbott family’s farmhouse shelter with sound design that “mirrors the silence in the films” and includes the incorporation of American Sign Language. That’s in addition to an icy, New York-set haunted house inspired by Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a demonic one dubbed “Insidious: The Further” (inspired by the Blumhouse franchise), one from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as the return of “Monstruos 2: The Nightmare of Latin America” and “Dead Exposure: Death Valley.” The Weeknd will again attach his name to a haunted house dubbed “The Weeknd: Nightmare Trilogy.” You’ll also find “Universal Monsters: Eternal Bloodlines,” an all-female assembly of the classic Universal Monsters (The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter, She-Wolf of London and Anck-Su-Namun) on the very stage where Dracula and Frankenstein were filmed in the ’30s. And over on the studio tour—ahem, Terror Tram—you can expect a Blumhouse takeover, while The Purge wi