Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Soul Seeker, 2024 (performance view). Commissioned for Abundance, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), April 24–26, 2024. Courtesy LACE. Photo: Angel Origgi

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) was founded in 1978 and prioritizes early-career support, experimental performance-based practices, and artists working at the margins of dominant discourse. Its current program reflects long-standing relationships with community organizations across Los Angeles and foregrounds artists from global majority backgrounds. Amid a multi-year gallery renovation, Selene Preciado continues LACE’s program through roving collaborations across the city, affirming its role as a responsive, community-centered platform for artistic production and public engagement. In November 2025, LACE will present A Tender Excavation at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at California State University, Los Angeles. Featuring artists such as Susu Attar, Mercedes Dorame, Heesoo Kwon, and Arlene Mejorado, the exhibition will include performances, poetry readings, and film programs. 

For spring 2026, LACE will launch RESILIENCE, a performance and interdisciplinary series showcasing artists who center their lived experience and bodies in response to illness, migration, and systemic violence. This program is a companion to ENDURANCE (2025) and ABUNDANCE (2024), which both highlighted invisibilized bodies through performance. The series is planned for presentation at L.A. Dance Project. In fall 2026, Poetics of Possibilities will inaugurate LACE’s newly renovated Hollywood Boulevard space, featuring new commissions by intergenerational artists with activist ties to the neighborhood, including Nick Angelo, Harry Gamboa Jr., Umi Hsu, and Audrey Chan. A solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based Gala Porras-Kim will follow, featuring new commissions exploring language and alternative epistemologies. 

Carlo Maghirang, MA-NA-NANG-GAL, 2024. Installation view in The Social Sculpture Project at Hearst Plaza, Lincoln Center, New York, March 24–31, 2024. Courtesy the artist

In summer 2027, a solo project by iconic transgender artist Cassils will include photography, sculpture, film, live performances, and workshops engaging trans embodiment and political resistance. The fall 2027 group exhibition Woman Dancing Down the Side of a Building will showcase media works by women artists who subvert the male-dominated history of modern architecture and urbanism. 

2028 marks LACE’s fiftieth anniversary. Programming will include Radical Repository, a digital archive and artist-led research project, and Previous Lives, a group exhibition that connects Mike Kelley’s Half a Man series (1987–91) to contemporary practices.

Selene Preciado is Curator and Director of Programs at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Prior to this role, she was a Program Associate at the Getty Foundation (Los Angeles). She has also held positions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA, Los Angeles), Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), the San Diego Museum of Art, and inSite_05 (San Diego/Tijuana). Recent curatorial projects include ENDURANCE (May 16–17, 2025), a performance series; ABUNDANCE (April 24–26, 2024), co-curated with Juan Silverio and presented by LACE at L.A. Dance Project; and Collidoscope: De la Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture (Riverside, CA), organized with the National Museum of the American Latino (Washington, DC) (2022–23, ongoing national tour). Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Preciado obtained a BA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and holds an MA in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California (USC).

Stamatina Gregory, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art