Revisiting and challenging the historically dominant narratives of large-scale abstraction, sculpture, and Land Art, this group exhibition engages with the legacy of formalism while confronting colonial histories, memory, and the natural world.
Through diverse practices and a distinctly feminist, material sensitivity, the artists reimagine the relationship between the body, object, and environment, offering new sculptural languages that both honor and unsettle the conventions of the past.
Expanding beyond an initial focus on metal, the works bring material and conceptual depth to question the history of monumentality in sculpture and to propose renewed ways of thinking about form, space, and relation.
Heavy Metal is curated by LAMAG curator, Nancy Meyer and includes works by Kelly Akashi, Miya Ando, Barbara Berk, Amy Bessone, Tanya Brodsky, Beatriz Cortez, Claire Chambless, Alika Cooper, Paige Emery, Katie Grinnan, Ting Ying Han, Andrea Hidalgo, Kelly Lamb, Abigail Lucien, Fay Ray, Brie Ruais, Carolyn Salas, Davina Semo, Kelly Wall, and Lisa Williamson.
Research and administrative support provided by Zandra Sweeney, Oxy InternLA 2025.
Kelly Akashi, Miya Ando, Barbara Berk, Amy Bessone, Tanya Brodsky, Beatriz Cortez, Claire Chambless, Alika Cooper, Paige Emery, Katie Grinnan, Ting Ying Han, Andrea Hidalgo, Kelly Lamb, Abigail Lucien, Fay Ray, Brie Ruais, Carolyn Salas, Davina Semo, Kelly Wall, Lisa Williamson
Spring Exhibitions Opening Reception
Saturday, April 4, 2026, 2 – 4 p.m.
In Conversation: A dialogue with artists from Heavy Metal
Featuring Amy Bessone, Claire Chambless, and Kelly Lamb
Saturday, April 18, 2026, 2 – 3 p.m. @ Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Join us Saturday, April 18, from 2 to 3 p.m. for a dynamic, artist-led conversation featuring Amy Bessone, Claire Chambless, and Kelly Lamb moderated by Nancy Meyer. This live dialogue brings together three distinct practices to explore material and perception, offering insight into the conceptual frameworks shaping their work.
Tea Ceremony for Divinatory Ecologies for More than Human Time
Featuring Paige Emery
Saturday, May 30, 2026, 12 – 1 p.m. @ Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Paige Emery will be offering an ecopoetic tea ceremony and guided meditation for listening to plants through the memory of water and moving with Earthly time through the end of a world. Herbal tea will be served and Paige will accompany the ceremony with live music. This piece is both an activation of her installation at LAMAG, and a community offering of ecological connection.
Paige Emery is an ecological artist, herbalist, and medicinal practitioner whose work explores rituals of remembering our relationship with the Earth. Rooted in art, ancestral medicine, eco-philosophy, and environmental activism, her practice connects inner states of awareness with broader ecological systems. Working across painting, installation, performance, and guided ecological experiences, Emery engages forms such as plant-based paintings, site-responsive land works, community rituals, and ecology walks. These projects invite reflection on reciprocity and care between human and more-than-human worlds.
Tea Ceremony for Divinatory Ecologies for More than Human Time with Paige Emery is a public program derived from the group exhibition Heavy Metal curated by LAMAG curator Nancy Meyer.
Lunch Time Chat
with Katie Grinnan, Andrea Hidalgo & Fay Ray
Friday, June 5 from 12 – 1 pm @ Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Join us for a conversation with Katie Grinnan, Andrea Hidalgo and Fay Ray moderated by Heavy Metal curator Nancy Meyer.
Katie Grinnan’s practice investigates the body as both instrument and site of perception. Fascinated by kinaesthesis, vision, and cognition, she examines how these finely tuned systems shape subjective experiences of reality, emotion, and self. Her work engages altered states of consciousness, including meditation and dreaming, to explore the mind’s expansive capacities.
Katie Grinnan received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Selected solo exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council, LAXART, DiverseWorks, Hammer Museum, Aspen Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Group exhibitions include presentations at Nevada Museum of Art, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Grinnan is the recipient of awards including a Creative Capital grant and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Her work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Andrea Hidalgo’s practice examines representations of love, lust, sex, pleasure, sexuality, gender, and power. Using scale, materials, objects, images, and cultural references, Hidalgo constructs environments that invite viewers to navigate what is suggested or implied. Familiar forms become layered with multiple meanings, encouraging reflection on how these subjects are shaped by social expectations and personal perception.
Andrea Hidalgo received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2013 and a BA from University of California, Riverside in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Open Call: Apophenia at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2024), curated by Nancy Meyers and Hugo Cervantes, as well as group exhibitions at Eastern Projects, POST, and Antena Gallery. Solo exhibitions include Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking? No, I’m Thinking What I’m Thinking (2013) and There’s A Million Ways To Go You Know That There Are (2012) at California Institute of the Arts.
Fay Ray’s metallic sculptures explore the fetishization of objects, the construction of female identity, and the abstraction of natural forms. Her high-contrast, monochromatic collages and monumental three-dimensional works assemble cast aluminum, volcanic rock, wire, chain, and organic materials into suspended sculptural masses.
Fay Ray received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Portals at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2024), Viscera at The Soraya Art Gallery at California State University, Northridge (2023), and exhibitions at Compound (2025), Nazarian / Curcio, Fierman, and James Fuentes. Ray’s work is held in major institutional collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Palm Springs Art Museum
Closing Day – Barbara Berk Performance
Saturday, June 20 @ Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Closing Day! Join us on Saturday, June 20 for one last time to see Barbara Berk perform live!
white-out, 2026
Performance, video projection
Berk has participated widely in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, with work shown at institutions such as the Yale University Art Gallery, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and venues in Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. Her practice consistently engages drawing, installation, and performative approaches across a long-standing and active exhibition career.
Throughout Barbara Berk’s practice, she has explored tension, balance, repetition, and the body as both tool and subject. Working across a variety of mediums, drawing has remained her primary point of entry into a methodical and meditative process. Quietly and subtly, her drawings and drawing performances extend from her body, shaped through repetition and restraint. These documented actions become performative, sculptural manifestations that transform simple gestures into meditative encounters with perception and embodied knowledge.
For LAMAG’s performance installation white-out, Berk precariously balances a long wooden stick while attempting to align it precisely with a rod installed on the wall in front of her. The act requires intense focus, physical stillness, and sustained attention, drawing viewers into a shared moment of curiosity and suspense. After some time, the artist releases the stick, which crashes to the floor with a sudden, disruptive bang that startles viewers when they least expect it. The reverberation evokes the subtleties of life’s balancing act and the fragility we live in moment-to-moment.
Barbara Berk holds an MFA from Pratt Institute, an MA from California State University, Fullerton, and additional graduate study at the Istituto Pio XII in Florence, as well as training at institutions including the University of Vienna, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BA from Clarke College in Iowa, forming a strong interdisciplinary foundation across the U.S. and Europe.
Her career spans a sustained exhibition history beginning in the mid-1980s, with solo exhibitions at venues such as the Riverside Art Museum, the Laguna Beach and Orange County contemporary art spaces, and university galleries across California and the Midwest. She is also known for an extensive performance practice presented at institutions including the Laguna Art Museum, Otis College of Art and Design, and the Irvine Fine Arts Center.
Heavy Metal | Family Discovery Guide PDF
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Los Angeles Times | Essential Arts Presented by David Zwirner | April 3, 2026