In the paintings that Keisho Okayama made during the last two years of his life, the colors appear, from a distance, unmoored, like they are floating off the canvas. A ghostly swish of orange hovers over a fuchsia wash. This effect changes the closer you get: Move in, and you start to see ridges and creases preserved by the plastic of the acrylic. Okayama prewashed but did not prime his canvas, which led to these wrinkles and made his otherwise ephemeral artworks feel so much more tactile. Seven of his paintings appear in ‘Pacific Abstractions’, the first exhibition since the new Los Angeles outpost of Perrotin Gallery, housed in a former art deco movie theater, has been fully renovated (they hosted four exhibitions while the renovation was still in progress). Senior director Jennifer King curated the show, viewing it in part as a retort to the oft-touted transatlantic dialogue, in which art history is framed as a tête-à-tête between New York and Europe. ‘Pacific Abstractions‘ tells the intergenerational, nonlinear story of an equally vibrant transpacific dialogue between artists working in Los Angeles and in Asia.

‘Pacific Abstractions’ is one of multiple recent exhibitions to acknowledge, with seamless elegance, that West Coast art has never been monolithic. Seventeen years ago, when I began writing about art in Los Angeles, shows like this were rarer, and, when they occurred, louder: If an exhibition told a midcentury story that diverged from the narrative of California as the birth-place of Light and Space, Fetish Finish or of Hard-Edge Abstraction, the press releases and curators’ statements had to argue for the legitimacy of these other perspectives. It was as if, cowed by the city’s century-old reputation as New York’s unsophisticated step-sibling, we were afraid to allow art in Los Angeles to appear too complex, too unruly. As the art ecosystem in Los Angeles has expanded, with galleries opening in disparate neighborhoods with a velocity that invalidates the notion that the art scene requires a coherent geographical center, this fear seems to be dissipating. And with this dissipation comes renewed possibilities for supporting art and telling overlapping, diverse and complicated stories about art in the region.

King, who spent 10 years as a curator at LACMA before joining Perrotin, has engaged deeply with artists who do not fit neatly into the dominant narratives about art in the Los Angeles region–for instance, she organized the LACMA iteration of the late Luchita Hurtado’s first museum survey, a show by the California grande dame who had not yet been recognized as such, and who collapsed the space between feminism, surrealism, abstraction and figuration.

‘Pacific Abstractions’ brings together younger California-based artists like Yunhee Min and Naotaka Hiro with artists like Kazuo Kadonaga, who worked in downtown Los Angeles in the 1980s before returning to Ishikawa, Japan, and Okayama, who first came to California from Osaka as a toddler. In 1936, Okayama’s father, a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist priest, was assigned to a congregation in Watsonville, south of Santa Cruz. Then World War II began. The family was among the 122,000 U.S. residents incarcerated in internment camps, and afterward, Okayama found refuge in art, studying at UCLA and spending the following 20 years splitting time between the studio and adjunct teaching. Though he exhibited around the region, he never had consistent gallery representation. His paintings here, all made within the past 15 years, appear new, as King puts it, even if they emerged from a decades-long practice. Hanging across from abstract experiments by Min and bodily meditations by Hiro, artists who could have easily been Okayama’s students, Okayama’s work takes its place in an ecosystem in which it seems always to have belonged.

Intuitive connections like these, between generations of California artists, also coursed through ‘Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s-80s’, which opened at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in June 2023. The show, Clara Kim’s first in her role as chief curator at the museum, took the relationships between artists and their community as its organizing principle. Kim’s arrival at the museum in 2022 represented a return to the city she grew up in Southern California and spent most of the aughts at CalArts REDCAT, where she curated South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s first U.S. exhibition and commissioned the Tokyo architects Atelier Bow-Wow to respond to L.A.’s storied case study house program. ‘Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to chart new paths and horizons for contemporary art,’ Kim said when she took the job.

The idea for ‘Mapping an Art World’ took root when Kim and her collaborator, MOCA associate curator Rebecca Lowery, visited Allen Ruppersberg’s studio. Ruppersberg, an artist known for his humorous experiments in the space between art and life (e.g., plated assemblages served as meals), has worked in Los Angeles since the mid-1960s. He spoke about the relational dynamics that so often fall by the wayside when art histories get written, such as the small-time collectors who gave their houses over to artists and the galleries running on shoestring budgets. As Kim later recounted, ‘These histories of relationships… are so crucial to the foundation of art history here.’

When the Argentinian artist David Lamelas moved to Los Angeles in 1976, he attempted to delineate his own community by inviting local artists to his studio to sit for pencil-drawn portraits, which he then photographed and turned into slides so he could project the images large onto the wall. The resulting artwork, Los Angeles Friends (Larger than Life), 1976, includes a drawing of John Baldessari looking skeptical. Each artist conveys a different mood, and each belongs to a different version of the city Lamelas began to make sense of. ‘I never experienced L.A. in a linear way,’ Lamelas said in a 2006 interview, ‘it’s made up of different communities, social classes and art groups.’

‘Mapping an Art World’ included ephemera from two artist-run galleries started in the 1960s, Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32: a poster from the ‘Sapphire Show’ at Gallery 32, the first documented West Coast exhibition of all Black female artists, which features beguiling baby photos of the three of artists, among them Betye Saar and Suzanne Jackson; bustling photographs showing Brockman Gallery’s storefront in the South Central neighborhood of Leimert Park glowing, overflowing with people. Both spaces supported Black artists when few other galleries did, and both served as gathering places. Kim’s inclusion of them in ‘Mapping an Art World’ underscored something revered scholar Mike Davis said, in one of his rare moments of optimism, about how art communities and street cultures that rub together in this city can ‘emit light of unusual warmth and clarity.’

Artist Keith Mayerson listened to Davis’ tome City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles while he worked on the paintings for his recent exhibition at Karma’s 2-year-old Los Angeles gallery–Mayerson tried in this way to enter the city’s psyche ‘like a method actor,’ he joked. The exhibition, called ’My American Dream: City of Angeles’, was the artist’s first local solo exhibition since he returned to Southern California almost nine years prior. For it, he took the city-loosely defined-as his subject. The centerpiece, Los Angeles from a Plane, 2023, is, as the title suggests, a painting of the city from an aerial view based on a photograph Mayerson took himself. He painted each pixel in the blown-up photograph, a meditative process that results in a cityscape that looks ever-so-slightly unsteady like Los Angeles is a mirage. ‘When I’m micromanaging, painting the pixels, I’m sort of seeing all these other worlds, but also thinking about the other worlds that constitute Los Angeles,’ he said. Indeed, this painting is the only one in this body of work that offers such a legible view of the city. Generally, the ‘City of Angels’ treats Los Angeles’ boundaries as fluid. One painting shows a Joshua tree toppled in the Mojave Desert, others images of UFOs and a portrait of Billie Jean King, the tennis star and SoCal native. Together, they portray a version of Los Angeles that is, as Mayerson calls it, ‘a world unto itself.’

Mayerson first arrived in Los Angeles at the dawn of the 1990s when he enrolled in the storied MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, in Orange County. He studies with Lari Pittman and Catherine Lord, as well as French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. When he returned to Los Angeles in the 2010s, he and his husband, Andrew Madrid, moved to Riverside while Mayerson commuted to teach at the University of Southern California near downtown Los Angeles. His experience of the region has always been wide and wayward, made coherent by his relationships with other artists. In a meandering conversation published in Mayerson’s recent book, his friend L.A. painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer posits that these personal relationships give art-making its optimistic potential. ‘It just feels like the answer is to make paintings for this small community of people in the hopes that at some point in the future, somebody looks at them and goes, “I understand something,” ’ Dupuy-Spencer says.

When Agnes Lew agreed to organize a series of studio visits for collectors coming to Los Angeles in 2019, Dupuy-Spencer was one of the first artists on her list. Lew, a collector who also uses her role as head of private banking at East West Bank to support artists, wanted to bring other collectors directly to artists. It was, after all, getting to know artists like Dupuy-Spencer whose oil paintings pulsate with equal intensity whether she takes the insurrection or an intimate encounter as her subject that had fortified Lew’s relationship to the city’s art scene. And she felt that ‘one of the highlights of the L.A. art scene is that the artists are quite accessible.’

The complaint about Los Angeles has long been that it can’t support a collector base, that even many of the highest earners in the city’s entertainment industry are gig workers, and this project-to-project existence inhibits the kind of legacy-building mindset that collecting requires. Or, another complaint: that the best Los Angeles collectors buy only from New York galleries. Of course, this has never been the whole story; collectors have for decades figured out how to be present and supportive in ways that suit the city’s idiosyncrasies. The most memorable examples, like Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, figureout how to  meet the needs of artists.

Over time, Lew adopted an artist-centered approach. She had been interested in art since her youth, and at first, she started buying art anonymously through auctions and fundraisers. Then, around the time she began her job at East West Bank in 2012, she started meeting artists attending gallery dinners as a plus-one and striking up conversations, building her own intimate network. She began buying from emerging artists. ‘Not because it’s the trendy thing to do,’ she said, but because it allowed her to slowly build a collection of works she wanted to live with and to help artists “at least in a small, tiny way, make a living.’

When the pandemic hit, she solidified this effort further. She began texting everyone she knew in the local artworld to see who needed help with their Paycheck Protection Program loans. ‘I just wanted to help the art community that I love,’ Lew said. Her East West Bank team immersed themselves in this project of helping artists financially survive the pandemic and then continued to do so, assisting artists who needed loans to buy studio buildings or their first home, helping them find tangible answers to the omnipresent question: How can I sustain this work?

I spoke with Lew just over a month before her friend, the Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey, opened an immersive retrospective at the Serpentine in London. Lew was looking forward to seeing it. Halsey’s exhibition, ‘emajendat’, would include walls and a floor plastered with shimmering CDs, and it would include funkmounds, the bulbous plaster sculptures Halsey makes, inserting found objects, family photographers and pop culture imagery into the crevices and indentations. The traces of her South Central neighborhood would be there, in the ephemeral archive of Black culture she has been collecting for years, in the iconography, textiles and textures. The Serpentine press release reiterates what the artist has continuously explained, that all of the artworks in her gallery shows and all her commissions are prototypes for ‘a permanent sculpture park in South Central.’ They are, in other words, not primarily for the gallery and its patrons but part of a profoundly local story unfolding elsewhere. They refute monolithic notions about art and the places in which and for which it is made.