On View

Edmund Teske: On Olive Hill

May 7–September 5, 2026

In the summer of 1943, Edmund Teske (Chicago, 1911–1996) first visited Olive Hill. He had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin (1936) and gravitated to this site on arrival in Los Angeles.

Teske met Aline Barnsdall in 1944 and, given his association with Wright, she invited him to move into Residence B, a dilapidated guest house she still owned on Olive Hill. According to Teske, as caretaker, he found “a dream house from out of the mind and soul of Frank Lloyd Wright… [that] sails with the clouds,” where he had a darkroom and would work as he felt. The site provided inspiration to explore, in Teske’s own words, “an organic philosophy for an integrated life.” The arrangement also offered relative financial freedom to the bohemian photographer, who here hosted avant-garde luminaries such as Man Ray and architect John Lautner.

Teske’s photographs document Olive Hill in transition. In 1943 the site was “like a great silent instrument which never again had to give another sound,” as Teske later recalled. Wright’s self-proclaimed “California Romanza” had found its first expression here in Hollywood, but by the 1940s, the monumental structures were in disrepair. Beginning in 1946, major renovations brought Hollyhock House back to life. Wright designed a temporary gallery for the park in 1954. Teske’s photos of Olive Hill (particularly the composites) “dematerialize fixed notions of time and space and reconfigure them in a new reality,” as scholar Julian Cox notes. Here Teske captures the timeless nature of Wright’s organic forms—integral to Teske’s artistic life on Olive Hill.

All photographs were gifted by Michael and David Devine to the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

 

Photo: Edmund Teske, Hollyhock House during reconstruction, c. 1945. © Edmund Teske Archives/Laurence Bump and Nils Vidstrand, 2001

RAVI GUNEWARDENA: IKEBANA FOR HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

Ongoing installation

Hollyhock House presents Ravi GuneWardena: Ikebana for Hollyhock House. The installation features striking new ikebana by GuneWardena, which reanimate the interiors of the Frank Lloyd Wright-described “garden house” through the Japanese art of flower arranging. The expressive arrangements introduce bold forms and textures with dried plant material, bringing nature indoors and further showcasing the influence of Japanese art and design on the site—built simultaneously with Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

“The placement of an ikebana arrangement can inform and define the work itself.  The light and space of Hollyhock House appear to have been designed with this art form in mind,” says GuneWardena.

The compositions reference the placement, mass, and scale of floral arrangements that Aline Barnsdall had in the house during the 1920s. GuneWardena also utilizes innovative materials that Sogetsu School founder Sofu Teshigahara embraced in his practice, dating back to the late 1920s. While ikebana is a centuries-old artform, the Sogetsu School, of which GuneWardena is a part, was established in 1927, challenging traditions of ikebana and celebrating freedom of individual expression. GuneWardena’s works active Wright’s gesamtkunstwerk interiors for Hollyhock House, adding new reference points in dialogue with the site’s holistic approach to art and architecture.

 

Photo: Installation view of Ravi GuneWardena: Ikebana for Hollyhock House by Hiroshi Clark, 2023.


PAST

RYAN PRECIADO: DIARY OF A FLY

January 22–April 25, 2026

Hollyhock House is pleased to announce Diary of a Fly, an exhibition of new and recent work by Los Angeles-based artist Ryan Preciado. Installed throughout the landmark structure, Preciado’s sculptures and textiles contend with the rhythmic patterning of Frank Lloyd Wright’s abstracted hollyhock motif that appears across the house’s furniture and concrete facade. The exhibition is titled after a late-1930s musical composition by Béla Bartók that imitates the frenzied pace of a fly. The music’s repetitive motifs and observation of the everyday resonates with Preciado’s approach to his site-responsive exhibition, which builds on Hollyhock House’s one-hundred year history as a platform for artists and experimentation.

Preciado makes work in conversation with his communities’ social and material histories. His process of designing and constructing a work includes piecing together visual references, artistic influences, and lived experiences into a useful object rife with metaphor. A longtime admirer of California car culture, Preciado often favors brightly colored automotive paint as a surface treatment for his sculptures.

Eight Different Ways (2025), installed in Hollyhock House’s inner courtyard, is a large-scale sculpture composed of bright-yellow geometric forms on a circular white base. This is a permutation of earlier works that echo Lucio Fontana-like cuts in a mesh fence that Preciado observed while walking through the city. To create the textiles in this exhibition, In a Flat Field (2025), Preciado worked with the Hernandez family of weavers in Oaxaca. The works are collectively titled after the debut album by the English goth band Bauhaus, a recurring soundtrack in Preciado’s studio as he worked on this exhibition. Their forms resonate with the proto-textile blocks on the building’s exterior and distort the sculptural forms in the courtyard.

Preciado frequently includes the work of other practitioners he admires in his exhibitions. In this context, he invited composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt to compose new music for a performance on Hollyhock House’s piano; a recording will be available to accompany the exhibition. A rotating presentation of works by artists including Matt Connors will also be on view. For Preciado, these gestures resonate with Aline Barnsdall’s vision for Hollyhock House as a center for creativity, community, and experimentation.

Diary of a Fly is curated by Cole Akers. Special thanks to Karma, New York and Los Angeles.

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Ryan Preciado has been the subject of exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum (2024–25); Karma, New York (2024); Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2023); and Canada, New York (2022, with Matt Connors). His work was included in Acts of Living, the 2023 edition of the biennial Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2021, the artist curated the group exhibition Downhearted Duckling at South Willard Gallery, Los Angeles. Preciado’s work is included in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

 

Photo: Ryan Preciado, Eight Different Ways, 2025, steel, aluminum, and automotive paint, 62 x 108 x 108 in. Photo by Roman Koval. © Ryan Preciado, Courtesy the artist and Karma.

JANNA IRELAND: EVEN BY PROXY

January 16, 2025–April 25, 2026

Commissioned on the occasion of Hollyhock House’s centennial, Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy presents photographs by the artist that introduce new perspectives on Los Angeles’s only World Heritage site. Ireland’s photographs privilege the quiet, subtle details of Hollyhock House and make visible the care and conservation that sustain the site over time.

The title of the exhibition comes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, in which he describes the process of realizing Hollyhock House. For Ireland, Wright’s phrase “even by proxy” points to the fraught relationship between client and architect in building the house as well as the ongoing project of preservation.

Even by Proxy is presented in partnership with Project Restore and the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University. 

 

Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family and domestic life, the built environment, and interactions between humans and the natural world.

Her 2024 mid-career survey, Janna Ireland: True Story Index, was jointly hosted by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In 2021, Ireland was awarded a Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph Williams’ work in Nevada. The resulting solo exhibition traveled from the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno to the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas and the AIA Center for Architecture in New York.

Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, SFMOMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Janna Ireland is the 2024 recipient of the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award, which is presented to a photographer who honors Shulman’s legacy by challenging the way we look at physical space. She is the recipient of the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, a 2023 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Program (COLA-IMAP) grant, and is a 2024 runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU. To learn more, visit www.jannaireland.com.

SUMMER SEATING: LAUN & BZIPPY AT HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

June 20–October 26, 2024

This past summer, Hollyhock House welcomed visitors to take a seat and enjoy the south terrace as Aline Barnsdall and her daughter Betty did a century ago. The special installation featured furnishings by LAUN and BZIPPY—innovative, women-led design practices here in Los Angeles.

While Frank Lloyd Wright designed furniture for Hollyhock House’s living and dining rooms, Barnsdall favored her own furnishings in other spaces, including the terraces and patios—rooms for outdoor living. Photographs from the 1920s show Aline, Betty, and friends using wrought iron and wicker furniture on the garden lawns. Betty and her playmates amused themselves on canopied swings and perched on poolside steps. Building on this legacy, LAUN and BZIPPY furnishings activate the south terrace, allowing visitors to engage with Wright’s garden house as Barnsdall had and as she wished the public would too in gifting her property to the City in 1927. Sinuous lines and striking geometries of the contemporary benches, chairs, and planter boxes create new points of reference with the architecture and indoor/outdoor living synonymous with Southern California.

 

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The installation was curated by Leigh Wishner and debuted as part of Los Angeles Design Weekend.

 

Photos: BZIPPY ‘Ruffle’ Planter & LAUN ‘Ribbon’ Chair collaged with Betty Barnsdall (left) & her friend Mary at Hollyhock House, c. 1922. Photo courtesy of David Devine and Michael Devine.

FLOWERS FOR ALINE: AN EXHIBITION BY SOGETSU IKEBANA LOS ANGELES BRANCH

April 18–21 & 25–28, 2024

Hollyhock House presented Flowers for Aline, a special exhibition of 45 fresh-flower works by the Sogetsu Ikebana Los Angeles Branch. With dynamic arrangements featuring spring’s finest blooms, the installation transformed Frank Lloyd Wright’s “garden house,” designed in 1921 for the visionary arts patron Aline Barnsdall, who gifted the landmark site to the people of Los Angeles nearly a century ago.

The exhibition, curated by Hollyhock House director Abbey Chamberlain Brach and architect and ikebana artist Ravi GuneWardena, featured expressive arrangements both inside and out—activating terraces gardens, spilling from cast concrete planter boxes, and responding to Wright’s artful interiors. For the first time since the site’s 2022 reopening, the child’s bedroom was on view as part of this special exhibition with six ikebana works in this space alone. 

On Saturday, April 20, four high-ranking Sogetsu masters and selected students presented ikebana demonstrations free to the public in the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre. Demonstrations by Marilyn Drageset, Yumiko Inoue, Chiyoko Chasin, Tony Shum, Mikayo Arao, Keiko Miyahara, Haruko Takeichi, and Kaz Kitajima. 

 

Photos: Hollyhock House living room, c. 1921, Los Angeles Public Library. Installation views of Flowers for Aline. Photos by Alex DelaPena.

ENTANGLEMENTS: LOUISE BONNET AND ADAM SILVERMAN AT HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

February 15–June 24, 2023

Entanglements: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman at Hollyhock House was the first artist intervention at the UNESCO World Heritage Site and the first formal collaboration for the Los Angeles-based couple. In dialogue with the site, Bonnet’s paintings and drawing and Silverman’s ceramics engaged the house’s 100-year history as a platform for artists and experimentation. The new works were installed in Hollyhock House’s public rooms where Aline Barnsdall’s celebrated art collection was once on display.

 

Known for her portraits of exaggerated proportions and grotesque features, Bonnet continually explores emotions of melancholy, loneliness, nostalgia and grief in her works on canvas or paper. Silverman is among the most dynamic practitioners dedicated to ceramics today and is known for his sculptural vessels and richly textured glazes. He brings an architect’s sense of structure to his objects and utilizes personal and experimental techniques to glaze and fire his works.

 

The exhibition was organized by Abbey Chamberlain Brach, Director & Curator at Hollyhock House. Special thanks to Galerie Max Hetzler.

 

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Photos: Installation views of Entanglements: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman at Hollyhock House, 2022. Photographs by Joshua White, courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler.