Los Angeles heads into November with a month of exhibitions that dig into archives, revisit overlooked histories and stage art in unexpected places. Hyperallergic's monthly guide picks ten shows across the city, from a witch-trial video game in Chinatown to a three-venue painting survey spanning Leimert Park, Exposition Park and Brentwood.

Several shows turn personal history into material. At Bel Ami, Isabelle Frances McGuire takes on the Salem Witch Trials with sculpture and an interactive game in which the player must survive as an accused woman. April Bey continues her Atlantica project at Vielmetter Los Angeles, translating portraits made during a 2024 residency in Memphis's Orange Mound neighbourhood into large tapestries of velvet, brocade and lace. Charles Arnoldi shows lyrical line paintings from 2016 to 2019 at Michael Kohn Gallery, while iris yirei hu mixes dream imagery, Tongva custom and Chinese herbal medicine in reliquary-style paintings and ceramics at Official Welcome.

Unconventional settings feature strongly. Milano Chow builds fictional facades from Los Angeles Public Library archive photographs at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House, shown beside Deborah Turbeville's dreamlike photographs. Yuntao Xu installs reflective fabric and coloured light inside a Glendale gas station. Todd Gray pairs his early commercial photography of rock stars with his later archival tableaux at The Brick, and Julie Tolentino builds a changing sound-and-scent environment at Fulcrum Arts in Pasadena.

Two historical surveys anchor the month. LACMA mounts the first large-scale exhibition on the Brockman Gallery, the Leimert Park space founded in 1967 by brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis that gave early support to David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar and others before closing in 1990. Reggie Burrows Hodges, meanwhile, spreads new and recent paintings across Art + Practice, the California African American Museum and the Getty Center, weaving Old Master influence together with memories of growing up in Compton.