Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Inner Landscapes: A Pulse Reading of MacArthur Park
Goethe-Institut LA Project Space, Los Angeles, CA
November 20, 2025–January 26, 2026
Each year, the Goethe-Institut puts out an open call for their series Neighborhood Interpretive Center, community-engaged exhibitions in MacArthur Park. The neighborhood has a storied history. In the early 20th century, the neighborhood was an upscale destination for tourists, who would lounge by the majestic urban lake fed by natural spring water. By the Mid-Century, the area became the landing spot for thousands of Central American immigrants, and pupusarias and swap meets moved into the fanciful art deco buildings. Today, MacArthur Park remains a gentrification holdout, and though the area is still vibrant, the community struggles with high opioid use, constant police activity, and, in June, ICE raids.
Artists Lauren Kim, Enoch Ma, and Jane Zhang revisit these histories through Inner Landscapes, where they’ve recreated the lake in various points of history through mylar, tablecloths, and PVC. Low lighting illuminates an installation of the lake pre-1934, when the city inexplicably decided to bisect the park by carving Wilshire Boulevard right through its center. Visitors can grab a fishing lure and catch keys in exchange for a prize. Other works include long PVC scrolls painted with Chinese ink, an homage to the boats that used to leisurely sail along the lake.
A special part of Inner Landscapes is the partnership with Dr. Han Jik Kim of Hajo Holistic, who is running donation-based acupuncture clinics throughout the exhibition’s run. Patients get to lie down in a prehistoric approximation of MacArthur Park, staring at wrinkled, geological peaks in painted canvas, while Dr. Kim works his magic. Unfortunately, the needle has become a negative, present-day motif for MacArthur Park, but Inner Landscapes remind us that needles also carry remedies.
Reflection: What would heal you?
Zoe Alameda: It Takes Two Wrongs to Make It Right
Cheremoya Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
December 12, 2025–January 31, 2026
I have always been taken by the ways humanity’s idiosyncrasies mix with the natural environment, finding unexpected beauty in infrastructure, machines, and safety measures. Alameda seems to be interested in the same interactions between nature and the built environment. Her paintings, photographs, and sculptures linger in the shadows of a curled, wrought iron gate cast against a staircase, a cheap paper tree air freshener emblazoned with a sticker, or the stains from graffiti and glue adding patterns to a sidewalk.
Touring It Takes Two Wrongs to Make It Right feels like Alameda has distilled the sights along a dérive, or an unplanned stroll with no destination in mind. The art is gritty in a stereotypical, urban sense, but also in physical technique. Alma produces low-resolution images from imperfect laser printers, etches text and Venn diagrams into plastic, and repurposes chipped wood to build frames and support stands.
Her showstopper is the two-sided display cobbled out of short planks of scrapwood, From Here On Out (2025), which mounts a number of smaller works upon scratched-up plexiglass. One angle offers an unobstructed view of the individual pieces, which include images of crinkled pigeons and glimpses of a human figure, and the reverse view partially obscures them via the rough etchings. I kept coming back to Laughing Makes It Worse (2025), an acrylic painting of two eggs, the yolks butting together. It has a subtle, iridescent haze to it, and the dreaminess is enhanced by small circles of shadows pulled from the sidewalk photographs. I thought of the soothing sight of a lazy morning with fresh eggs, enjoyed on a porch I don’t have, while steam rises through a sewer grate.
Reflection: What’s stamped into the sidewalk?
—Renée Reizman