In a sluggish art market, overinflated by speculation and the unsustainable growth of the ultracontemporary (i.e., emerging) artist sector, collectors are said to be contributing to a much-discussed “flight to quality,” That usually translates to resilient blue-chip paintings and prints by household names. Coinciding with the Frieze Los Angeles art fair, many prominent galleries are interpreting “flight to quality” as a return trip to whiteness, to maleness and toward artists that are middle-aged, senior or dead.
The Los Angeles gallery landscape, however, is nothing if not diverse. Below are five shows to see this month, in the spirit of Eileen Harris Norton’s collection, that belie the notion that quality is to be found only in the loftiest echelons of the international art market [...]
“The Work Is Never Finished: Prints, Drawings and Paintings by Samella Lewis”
Eileen Harris Norton’s first purchase, a 1976 linocut by Ruth Waddy, was bought from the artist at the Museum of African American Art, an institution founded by Samella Lewis (1923-2022), the artist, scholar and arts advocate. A few years earlier, Waddy and Lewis had collaborated on the groundbreaking book “Black Artists on Art” (1969). This exhibition of Lewis’s artworks ranges from a 1942 charcoal drawing to late paintings, but its core may be the linocuts that Lewis made in the 1960s and ’70s, some depicting migrant laborers and others, such as “Black Sun,” that are strikingly abstract...
“The Work Is Never Finished: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings” unearths the prolific work of Samella Lewis (1923-2022), an artist, educator, activist, historian and curator. Lewis kept her own practice throughout her life, even as she worked for museums and universities, founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and launched the periodical, Black Art: An International Quarterly (later published as the International Review of African American Art). As a Black woman who grew up in the segregated South, she transmuted the prejudice her community faced into striking scenes of human connection, many of them sketched from memory and some rendered as linocuts. The exhibition runs through March 7.
Los Angeles Art Week (Feb. 26 to March 1) has grown to become one of the country’s leading cultural and commercial art events, featuring fairs alongside blue-chip galleries and museum-level programming throughout the city.
The week is an essential market for Black art. From Inglewood to West Hollywood, Black creatives are having a moment.
The arrival of collectors, curators, and cultural power brokers in LA capitalized on this momentum. Here are some highlights.
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Samella Lewis, who founded the Museum of African American Art and curated “Black Art: An International Quarterly,” died in 2022. Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles presents a rare gallery exhibition called “The Work Is Never Finished, which features Lewis’ diverse artistic collection—lithographs, drawings, and paintings that reflect her decades-long socio-political activism. The exhibition allows viewers to study Lewis’ artistic legacy.
Frieze week is here, which means Los Angeles turns into a city-wide exhibition crawl with a (heavy) side of traffic. This special edition of The Art Edit is focused on what to see outside the fair tents: a tight list of exhibitions worth building your week around, organized so you can plan by neighborhood and keep your sanity intact. Lots to see, lots to do—so let’s be strategic.
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The Work is Never Finished: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings by Samella Lewis
Artist(s): Dr. Samella Lewis (1923–2022)
Location: Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood
Dates: On view through March 7, 2026
Description: Artist, educator, activist, art historian, and curator Dr. Samella Lewis spent most of her life championing Black artists and building pathways into institutions that routinely shut them out. This exhibition centers Lewis the artist—making work not for the field, but for herself: artmaking as a personal imperative and a way to process collective experience. Working largely from memory rather than live models, her prints, drawings, and paintings move between outrage and intimacy—migrant workers compressed into a truck bed, a guarded figure turned away, the defiant laborer in Field (1968) with fist raised toward the sun—alongside later scenes of quieter human connection.
Why You Should See It: This is a chance to meet Lewis beyond the résumé. The work holds collective portraits of pain, endurance, and hope with symbolic clarity—and her line lands like both studio truth and cultural mandate: “the work is never finished.”
Hello, LA!
I’m Carolina A. Miranda and the art fairs are upon us! The art market may be softer than the Pillsbury Doughboy on a hot day, but that doesn’t mean that LA isn’t going all out — and so am I, with my Highly Official, Totally Scientific Art Insider Guide to Frieze Week With Handy Google Map [...]
LA galleries have some truly exquisite shows on view and they are F-R-E-E. Here's what's on my radar:
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Louis Stern Fine Arts (West Hollywood)
The gallery is showing drawings, prints, and paintings by the late Samella Lewis, an important doyenne of LA’s Black arts scene.
This week’s exhibitions look back to move forward—mining memory, history, and personal archives to illuminate where we are now. And they stretch far and wide, from Santa Monica to downtown LA to Riverside [...] Over at Louis Stern Fine Arts, The Work is Never Finished honors Dr. Samella Lewis, whose prints and drawings channeled fury at racial injustice into symbolic visual expression [...]
Dr. Samella Lewis’s artwork, long secondary to her advocacy, is the focus of a new exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts.
A review of the must-see current show at James Fuentes Gallery; new exhibitions opening at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Shatto Gallery, Von Lintel Gallery, Louis Stern Fine Arts, M+B Gallery, and Philip Martin Gallery; and a trove of talks and programs at the Getty Center, Blue Roof Studios, ArtCenter, ICA LA, and Thomas Cooper Studio’s open house with Shana on the mic.