For his third solo show in Los Angeles, David Benjamin Sherry presented a series of nearly two dozen photographs of the American West. As with his past work, the large-scale prints were made in and around national parks with an 8 x 10 field camera. And as with his earlier images, these photos of lakes, glaciers, canyons, and granite domes are uniformly crisp to the point of unreality, with equally crystalline details in the works’ backgrounds and foregrounds. Sherry pays homage to the technical brilliance of modernist photographers of the land and, more specifically, to the sites they frequented.

Passing through Rudolph Schindler’s Bethlehem Baptist Church, one witnessed fifty-one glimmering words, which whispered from the walls of this nearly forgotten architectural monument. One of only a few modernist masterpieces still intact in South Central Los Angeles, and one of even fewer located in this once-segregated neighborhood (the result of restrictive housing covenants), the church was built in 1944 to serve an African American congregation. It would later be sold and then abandoned before undergoing a partial renovation by Reverend Melvin Ashley in 2013. After briefly serving his

“The main thing is to tell a story,” Frank O’Hara declares in “Fantasy,” which appeared in his seminal 1964 collection Lunch Poems. In the text, O’Hara slaloms back and forth between daydreams of Helmut Dantine, the Nazi antihero of the 1943 film Northern Pursuit, and tending to an ailing Allen Ginsberg, who spends the poem wrestling with indigestion behind a bathroom door. The story the poet tells has no single narrative but skitters between reverie and a makeshift recipe for Alka-Seltzer.

Kate Newby borrowed O’Hara’s formula—“two aspirins a vitamin C tablet and some baking soda”—as

“The Sympathetic Imagination”—a title taken from J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003)—aptly describes both the sensibility that runs through Diana Thater’s practice and the artist’s careful consideration of her viewer, as evidenced by this timely, generous, and thoughtfully curated survey. Divided between LACMA’s Art of the Americas galleries and those of its Broad Contemporary Art Museum (unaffiliated with the Broad museum several miles east), this exhibition, organized by Lynn Cooke, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim,