Like a local art world Olympics, seemingly every museum in Southern California has come together to mount their own exhibition on a common theme, “Art & Science Collide.” It’s all part of the third iteration of PST ART (formerly Pacific Standard Time), a Getty-funded initiative that’s offered nearly $20 million in grants to museums and a few galleries to stage exhibitions on artificial intelligence, climate change, cyberpunk and dozens of other topics at the intersection of art and science.
PST ART officially kicked off this past weekend with artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosive WE ARE event at the Coliseum, as well as the debut of almost 40 exhibitions—with just as many still to come over the next few months. For the average Angeleno, though, there’s only so much time and money you can spend on all of these shows (thankfully many are at free museums or offer free hours—though parking on the other hand…). So where should you start? We suggest seeing these four standout shows first, as well as keeping your eye on four others that are set to open soon.
Four PST ART exhibitions to see right now
Olafur Eliasson: OPEN
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
Through July 6, 2025
By far our favorite among the initial batch of PST ART shows, this spectacular exhibition from the Icelandic–Danish artist brings a new series of optical installations to MOCA’s Little Tokyo location. Don’t let the reflective, colorful pieces fool you into thinking this is some run-of-the-mill “immersive” exhibit: Olafur Eliasson’s works invite you to admire the everyday miracles of physics that shape how we see the world.
Step inside the towering, mirror-lined stacks in the intro gallery to drift into infinite spaces and mini worlds—in two cases illuminated by the sun and sky poking through the warehouse-style space. Eliasson’s colorful, photogenic kaleidoscopes are sure to be crowd pleasers, but they—and most other installations here—are just as thrilling for the behind-the-scenes peeks they offer at the surprisingly simple, analog optical contraptions that make them possible.
You’ll need a timed ticket ($18) to see “Olafur Eliasson: OPEN,” but look for reservations on the first Friday of the month (5–8pm) for free admission.
Lumen: The Art and Science of Light
The Getty Center
Through Dec 8, 2024
As you might expect, the Getty has a sizable slate of free PST Art exhibitions this fall, and this one is easily the largest and most notable. “Lumen” takes a multi-faith approach to how astronomy and optics impacted art and religion in the Middle Ages—in other words, you’ll find illuminated Hebrew Bibles and a Byzantine chandelier alongside an Islamic astrolabe from the 1200s and a 12th-century manuscript that documented how monks used constellations to tell time.
The Getty ties some contemporary pieces into the exhibition, as well, including Fred Eversley’s purple-hued parabolic lens and one of Anish Kapoor’s void-like Vantablack sculptures. These current-day pieces extended outside of the gallery, as well: You’ll find a fuzzy, meditative sculpture from Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian in the museum’s north pavilion, as well as Charles Ross’s array of rainbow-scattering prisms in the entrance hall.
Make sure to scope out an eye-popping pair of shows in the west pavilion, too: “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography,” which features abstract prints from artists like László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, as well as “Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography,” a collection of portraits and landscapes that appear to float within their frames. Both are open through November 24.
Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology
Autry Museum of the American West
Through June 21, 2026
More than 50 works on display at the Autry showcase how indigenous artists have crafted visions of alternative futures in the face of enduring colonial trauma. The bottom-floor exhibition opens with a semicircle of high fashion, including remarkable crow attire from Cannupa Hanska Luger, which is paired with video footage from his accompanying performance piece. Star Wars plays a surprisingly large role in the vibrant show, including Andy Everson’s Northwest Coast-inspired take on stormtrooper helmets.
The exhibition spills into the upstairs galleries, too, with a surreal spacescape from Wendy Red Star and a multimedia installation from Virgil Ortiz, who’s reimagined the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 through a Dune-meets-MCU film-like lens. Also, make sure to check out the museum’s other PST ART show, which opened back in May and runs through January 5, 2025; “Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West” tackles everything from mining surveys to nuclear blasts in its examination of documenting and surveilling Western U.S. landscapes.
Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice
Hammer Museum
Through Jan 5, 2025
Hatched during the pandemic and 2020’s social justice demonstrations, this exhibition—guest curated by Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake—examines how environmental art intersects with equity. In practice, that means you’ll find pieces that contemplate the power dynamics of our changing natural world, like Tiffany Chung’s floating model of a flooded Southeast Asian village or LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photos of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
The large-scale installations perched above the museum’s courtyard are most likely to grab your attention, though: Lan Tuazon’s plastic recycling station, a green oasis from South L.A.’s self-described “gangsta gardener” Ron Finley and a literal hive of activity around Garnett Puett’s Untitled (Paradoxical Garden Downstream), a trio of wax figures buzzing with honeybees (they’re behind glass and a few curtains but you may still find some nearby wild bees attracted to it).
Plus four upcoming PST ART exhibitions to look forward to
World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project
California African American Museum
Sept 18, 2024–Mar 2, 2025
By the time you read this, this free CAAM exhibition will likely already be open. But we previewed it while it was in the middle of installation—and were already able to tell it has plenty of fascinating pieces in store. The exhibition highlights Carver’s pioneering work in agricultural science (including, of course, his promotion of the peanut) as well as his seldom-displayed artwork; you’ll find a few of Carver’s drawings on display as well as lab instruments and a vial of Egyptian blue pigment that he created. Much of the wall space, however, is given over to the contemporary artists that he continues to inspire over a century later, including Kevin Beasley’s large canvases made of cotton and Terry Adkins’s recreation of Carver’s dye studies.
Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema + Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Oct 6, 2024–July 13, 2025 (“Cyberpunk” through April 12, 2026)
We had a chance to check out two upcoming film exhibitions at the Academy Museum in the very early days of their installation. We’ll start with the smaller of the two, “Cyberpunk,” which is taking over the double-height Hurd Gallery with posters from films like Blade Runner and The Matrix, as well as a never-before-exhibited costume from Tron and a prop silicone head from Ex Machina. At its center, massive, diagonally-cut screens will showcase settings from cyberpunk, Afrofuturist, Indigenous futurist and Latinx futurist films.
“Color in Motion” is the main star this fall, though, with an ambitious timeline that traces the use of color in early works like the Lumière brothers’ Serpentine Dance short and tinted reels of silent films up to costumes from contemporary films like Django Unchained and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The return of Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz is the blockbuster headliner, but we were treated to a fly-through animation that promised all sorts of other goodies, including an interactive, neon-hued “Color Arcade” and a projection of the trippy stargate from 2001: A Space Odyssey that extends into a wall graphic that leads toward the exit. There was one delightful installation already assembled for our walkthrough: a recreation of Oskar Fischinger’s Lumigraph, a soft, stretchy screen with layers of lights that you can push into with your hands to create some hypnotic routines set to music. It’s… admittedly difficult to put into words, so just trust us when we say it’s very cool.
Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures
LACMA
Oct 20, 2024–Mar 2, 2025
You can already feast on LACMA’s PST ART offerings with the beautiful “We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art,” as well as a single-gallery preview of “Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film.” But we walked away from our recent visit most eager to return for the debut of “Mapping the Infinite,” a collaboration with the Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory that brings together a global collection of pieces, from the Stone Age to today, that reflect humans’ ever-evolving attempts to explain the origins of the universe.
Alongside pieces of sacred artwork and architecture, you can expect some heady, scientifically-minded contemporary works—like a teaser from Josiah McElheny that’s already on display in the center of the Resnick Pavilion. Island Universe features five reflective, rod-encircled spheres; each individual sculpture is supposed to represent a different parallel universe, and each branching rod the passage of time.
Dough Aitken’s Lightscape
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Nov 16, 2024
Marciano Art Foundation
Dec 17, 2024–Mar 15, 2025
You might know Doug Aitken best for the mirrored house he created in the Coachella Valley back in 2017. But for PST ART, the L.A. artist is turning to film—and dance, music, installation, landscapes… just a little bit of everything, really. The resulting piece, Lightscape, is a hypnotic assembly of Southern California-set stories that’ll make its debut with live orchestration and vocals at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in November before heading to the recently reopened Marciano Art Foundation in December, where it’ll screen for free in the spacious theater gallery (and, on Saturdays, be paired with live performances).
Aitken composed the soundtrack alongside Grant Gershon and the L.A. Master Chorale (with some small contributions from Beck, who appears busking outside a doughnut shop in the trailer, as well as La Lom and James Gadson), with minimalist orchestrations performed by Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic.
We were invited to Aitken’s Westside studio for a conversation with the artist, as well as an extended look at Lightscape. If you’ve seen Koyaanisqatsi (or Aitken’s 2016 MOCA show) than you have some idea of what to expect: a beautifully shot, rhythmically-paced anthology of about a dozen settings and characters. There are vocals but no traditional dialogue; instead you’ll see dancers in both designed installations and out in the wild, be it in front of the DWP building or inside an Amazon-esque warehouse. One second a cowboy is trotting on horseback past a desert gas station, another Natasha Lyonne is running around a parking garage and then in the next moment a mountain lion slowly stalks its way past a suburban swimming pool. Yep, that all seems pretty L.A. to us.