A Compton-born painter who once chased a tennis scholarship before turning to canvas is about to get one of the more unusual museum rollouts Los Angeles has seen: three institutions, three exhibitions, one artist, all opening within days of each other. Reggie Burrows Hodges, now 61, will see his new work go on view simultaneously at the Getty Center, the California African American Museum and Art + Practice in Leimert Park starting October 20, marking his first solo museum exhibitions in Southern California.
The three-venue rollout, as reported by MyNewsLA.com, pairs the Getty's own collection with Hodges' distinctive style, in which he coats raw canvas or linen with an opaque black ground so that faceless figures emerge from the darkness as what the Parrish Art Museum has described as a stand-in for humanity. Rather than building up from white, Hodges treats blackness as both the physical foundation of the painting and the figure itself.
At the Getty, the exhibition titled Reggie Burrows Hodges: A Theater of Passions will be displayed in the museum's East Pavilion through February 28, 2027, and features five paintings drawing on old master works by the father-and-daughter painters Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work is held in the Getty's collection. The five paintings relate to three 17th-century Italian works from that collection and examine themes of violence and theatricality, according to the seed reporting. A Theater of Miracles, the concurrent presentation at CAAM in Exposition Park, includes work influenced by Jacopo Bassano's 16th-century painting The Miracle of the Quail, which will be displayed alongside Hodges' pieces, and that show will run through February 28, 2027.
A Homecoming Rooted in Compton and Leimert Park
Over at Art + Practice in Leimert Park, Reggie Burrows Hodges: A Theater of Dreams will be presented through February 27, 2027, featuring new paintings influenced by Hodges' childhood memories of Compton, the legacy of Leimert Park, and his travels in Europe. Art + Practice itself carries deep South Los Angeles roots: the venue was co-founded in 2014 by artist Mark Bradford, philanthropist Eileen Harris Norton and activist Allan DiCastro to pair museum-grade contemporary art with social services for foster youth, as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time; Bradford himself grew up in the neighborhood.
According to organizers, Hodges' new works across all three venues incorporate his own experiences and artistic style, continuing a practice built around themes of memory, labor and power. Cameron Shaw said each venue in the collaboration offers a distinct entry point to Hodges' practice. Getty Museum director Timothy Potts said Hodges is an exceptional artist recognized internationally for his ingenuity and deeply passionate visual storytelling, and Potts added that the Getty Museum is partnering with CAAM and Art + Practice to display Hodges' newest work.
From Compton Tennis Courts to International Acclaim
Hodges' path to painting wound through athletics, music and theater long before Los Angeles institutions came calling. Born in Compton in 1965, he attended the University of Kansas on a tennis scholarship to study theater and film, co-founded the reggae band Trumystic, and worked as a USTA Pro Circuit tennis coach before committing to painting full-time after moving to Maine in 2008, according to the Studio Museum in Harlem. That background in competitive movement and performance frequently surfaces in his figurative work, which often depicts intimate and everyday moments.
Hodges has since built a national and international profile, including the 2021 Jacob Lawrence Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and the inaugural 2023 Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. Prize from the Addison Gallery of American Art, honors that supported his studio practice and catalyzed acquisitions by museums nationwide. He has previously held solo exhibitions at the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Parrish Art Museum, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, per the seed reporting from MyNewsLA.com.
Labor, Landscape and a European Prelude
One recurring thread in Hodges' practice is labor and California working-class identity. In February 2025, the Parrish Art Museum exhibited his monumental painting Labor: Sound Bath from 2022, part of a series inspired by California's Central Valley that balances peaceful rural imagery with what the museum described as subtle socio-political commentary about agricultural work and the industry's reliance on exploitative labor.
Before his Southern California museum debut, Hodges had already established a commercial foothold in Los Angeles through solo gallery shows at Karma, presenting The Reckoning in May 2023 and Authorities of Reason in January 2025, the latter showcasing works made during his travels through European cities as he examined light and historical architecture, according to MutualArt's coverage of the show. He also opened his first European solo museum exhibition, Mela, in May 2026 at the Malta International Contemporary Art Space, featuring more than 30 new paintings and a sound installation created during an extended residency on the island, with the largest canvases of his career and site-specific responses to Caravaggio.
A Getty Lecture and a Broader Institutional Push
The Getty Center will host a free public lecture featuring Hodges on October 27, in which he will join exhibition curators Davide Gasparotto and Bridget R. Cooks for a conversation, followed by a reception and a chance to view the Getty exhibition. The tri-venue project also builds on a longer institutional effort: the Getty Research Institute launched its African American Art History Initiative in 2018 in partnership with local entities including CAAM and Art + Practice to preserve and digitize Black art history, an effort aimed at making African American art scholarship widely accessible across Southern California and beyond, according to Culture Talk's 2018 report on the initiative.
CAAM itself carries its own institutional weight in that mission. Chartered by the State of California in 1977, the museum moved into its permanent Exposition Park facility, designed by Black architects Jack Haywood and Vince Proby, during the 1984 Summer Olympics, and it now houses a permanent collection of more than 6,000 objects and artifacts as a state-supported agency. Taken together, the three concurrent shows trace a geographic arc from Brentwood to Exposition Park to Leimert Park, tying a Compton-born painter's homecoming to institutions built for very different neighborhoods and very different missions.
