The opening of “Made in L.A.,” the biennial survey of art from Los Angeles, is a red-letter day on the Southern Californian art calendar. On preview night at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, lines regularly form around the block.

As its title promises, artists must work (or have worked) in Los Angeles, and it has built a reputation for introducing audiences to exciting new names, often young or overlooked, and bracing fresh work. If the winds align, “Made in L.A.” will also offer some form of curatorial argument: a vision of the city, or, say, a proposal for what it is lacking.

This year, I got almost none of that.

“Made in L.A. 2025” is organized by Essence Harden, an independent curator formerly with the California African American Museum, and Paulina Pobocha, until last year the senior curator at the Hammer and now the chair and curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Unusually, the pair chose not to title their edition, and made clear in the biennial’s catalog that their personal viewpoints were secondary to those of their artists. “We have no ideas. And I think that’s good,” Pobocha declared.

I respect their humility. And I share their sense of this city as often maddeningly dissonant. But at this time of uncertainty in the art world (and in the world at large), of a deepening culture war and disagreements over art’s role in resisting an administration bent on cutting funding for projects deemed “woke,” we need something inspiring. Something to rally around.

Sure, there are some strong artists represented, and in a few cases strong presentations of those artists’ work. A vaulted gallery hosts a five-painting installation by Hanna Hur, a delicate, wry homage to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. In a small gallery on the floor below, an installation by the conceptual artist John Knight featuring a folded electric blanket (plugged in) and a blurb touting real estate development is as stark and caustic as when it was made, in 1974. It’s interesting to consider how much has changed over the past half-century, and how Knight’s rancor contrasts with Hur’s mildness.

Beaux Mendes, who has shown little in the city, is represented by a suite of tender, near-abstract paintings, some done en plein-air and resembling tree trunks, alongside a tusk-shaped sculpture and a frighteningly weird vitrine encasing models of a shrouded body on an operating table, flanked by partly nude doctors — one male doctor visibly aroused. (Mendes is too subtle an artist for puns about wood; my best guess is that there is, buried here, a correlation between trunks — of bodies, of trees — and the erotics of close looking.)

Altogether, however, the show doesn’t add up to much. Too often, good artists are represented by middling works or unproductive juxtapositions (Brian Rochefort’s lava-like ceramic vessels, for example, against Greg Breda’s contemplative portraiture and Amanda Ross-Ho’s oversize hyperrealist sculptures of decorated doors, copied from her father’s nursing home). We get historical work (by Pat O’Neill and Alonzo Davis) that struggles to transcend its vintage (the 1960s and ’80s, respectively).

It’s tempting to speculate that the exhibition’s lack of nerve is linked to the curators being overstretched. Halfway through planning the show, Pobocha relocated for her new job in Chicago; Harden is an in-demand independent curator who also organizes a section of the Frieze L.A. art fair. The biennial comes at a moment of transition at the Hammer, as its new director, Zoë Ryan, takes the reins from a longtime leader, Ann Philbin, who retired last year.

Or perhaps the fault is with the flagging market and galleries that have closed, leaving their artists high and dry. Yet across the city, there is an abundance of good shows by Los Angeles artists. From where I’m standing, the scene looks to be in resolute health.

The painter Kristy Luck, another standout this year at “Made in L.A.,” recently opened a perfectly stated exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen of small, dusky paintings that are studies in strangeness: They defy recognition, even though they are imbued with the texture, light and gravity of generic still lifes and landscapes.

At François Ghebaly Gallery, Salim Green shows similarly enigmatic abstract paintings, here on thick felt panels, but the core of his exhibition is “Taileater” (2025), a 13-minute mash-up of appropriated footage, C.G.I. and Super-8 film. Green’s work revolves around intimations of potential harm, camouflage and self-protection. In one near-comical section of the film, a figure in a shaggy ghillie suit moves in and out of a hedge; in another, a digitally animated avatar of Green scrolls on his phone through a wikiHow guide to hiding.

The Gothic is clearly having a moment in contemporary art. At the smart new Beverly Hills premises of Hoffman Donahue (a partnership, announced in September, between Hannah Hoffman of Los Angeles and Bridget Donahue of New York), the painter Adam Alessi presents a suite of accomplished and often chilling new pictures. In “Shiver” (2025), a figure grins through a face half-decomposed; in “Dear Friend” (2025), a skull peers over its caped shoulder. Technically and iconographically these paintings are rather traditional, but they feel wholly apt for our contemporary moment.

The sculptor Claire Chambless also constructs her worldview from the shadows. In most of the wall- and plinth-mounted sculptures in her exhibition “Spleen” at Morán Morán, she applies mucinous-looking carapaces of bone-colored resin to found dollhouses. Artists have used dollhouses and architectural models before — notably, in Los Angeles, Mike Kelley, Kaari Upson and Richard Hawkins, all clear influences on Chambless — but this emerging artist comes out of the gate with a fully developed aesthetic entirely her own.

The witchy vibe extends to “Stitious,” a group show at Michael Benevento, which takes its name from a jokey modification of “superstitious.” (Not super, just slightly.) The highlight of this spare selection is a kinetic sculpture by Gozié Ojini, “881.5 lbs” (2025), built around two sawn-down pianos that smash their own strings intermittently, as if possessed — perhaps by the old family photographs that Ojini has pasted into them.

In recent months, galleries in the city have been shuttering — Blum, Clearing, LA Louver, Sargent’s Daughters, Sean Kelly, Shrine, Tanya Bonakdar, and others — all for different reasons. But galleries have been opening and restarting too.

In the 1927 Granada Buildings, in the Westlake neighborhood, Ariel Pittman inaugurated her gallery Official Welcome earlier this year. Its third show, by the underrecognized Los Angeles painter Cameron Harvey, is a resplendent array of stained and folded canvases, each separated by a vertical split and shaped like giant petals, leaves or insect wings.

Sea View gallery, run by Sara Lee Hantman, has moved closer into town, from a house in Mount Washington designed by the artist Jorge Pardo, to a restored 1930s Hollywood fourplex. The first show is by the Mumbai-based painter Amitesh Shrivastava. These nearly abstract evocations of the thick forests of Chhattisgarh, India, where he grew up, thrum with a sense of aliveness that one gets from Harvey’s canvases, too.

“When you are in nature, you dissolve,” Shrivastava is quoted as saying in the exhibition’s news release. The dissolution of the self is central to Gothic tropes too — decay, death, submission to nonhuman forces — but in Shrivastava’s and Harvey’s work the phenomenon assumes a more wholesome cast. Whether through nature or the occult (or in the fertile place where the two overlap), these exhibitions all offer new things to believe in.

Through March 1, 2026, at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard; 310-443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

François Ghebaly Gallery, ghebaly.com; Hoffman Donahue, hoffmandonahue.com; Official Welcome, officialwelcome.art; Michael Benevento, beneventolosangeles.com; Morán Morán, moranmorangallery.com; Parrasch Heijnen, parraschheijnen.com; Sea View, sea-view.us.