Vielmetter Los Angeles – contemporary art gallery

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to welcome LaToya Ruby Frazier to the gallery’s program. We look forward to her debut solo exhibition in January 2027, which will mark the first gallery presentation of her work on the West Coast.

Frazier’s upcoming exhibition will debut a new body of work entitled FIRST 100 DAYS: A NEW CIVIC PORTRAITURE 2025–2027, a suite of 42 color transfer photographic portraits of everyday American citizens who mobilized in the nation’s capital to protest the impact of Trump’s executive orders during his first 100 days in office. With deep reverence and meticulous attention to detail, Frazier documents the people who contested the orders, tariffs, dismissals, funding freezes, deportations, pardons, institutional changes, and new definitions of citizenship, gender, history and national identity in the public arena. The portraits act as a kind of human counter-archive to the second administrative record and upend the notion that civic portraiture is only reserved for the elite to visually establish their authority or political legitimacy. Each print is created through a digital printmaking process in which the artist applies physical pressure to the image to transfer an inkjet-receptive film onto cotton watercolor paper, lending the surface a tactile and imperfect quality that mirrors the fragility of our democracy.

The new suite of photographs will be shown together with a project commissioned for Frazier’s 2024 survey at the Museum of Modern Art, Monuments of Solidarity, which focused on the renowned activist Dolores Huerta. Frazier spent time with Huerta and her extended family in California, documenting the extraordinary role Huerta has played in improving the lives of farmworkers and in shaping labor policy both on the state and national level.

Portrait of LaToya Ruby Frazier. Photo credit: Sean Eaton. Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian for being named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the ‘Genius’ Grant. Each year, the MacArthur Fellowship is awarded to talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.

Working across a wide range of media, Rodney McMillian has devoted decades to observing the intersections of race, class, and power, and to tracing the imprint these social constructs leave on the body and on the landscape. McMillian recognizes that history leaves a mark on the physical world, and his practice is centered around objects that carry indexical records of the past. His work masterfully recontextualizes found materials, from thrifted household items and worn bedding to political speeches and historical texts, exposing buried meanings. Like a ghostly presence, history pervades McMillian’s work – a secondhand quilt becomes the ground for a painterly landscape, a cast iron piggy bank is nearly subsumed by malignant sculptural accretions, a president’s speech is reiterated by a different body, in a different time, for a different audience. Each of these maneuvers creates a dramatic shift in context and makes conspicuous what was previously unseen.

Image: Rodney McMillian, Artist, 2026 MacArthur Fellow, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Link: Rodney McMillian 2026 MacArthur Fellow and ‘Genius’ Grant Recipient (opens in a new tab)