Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945

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.