Image: Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Zoe Walsh will debut ‘Gathering’, a commissioned, site-specific mural on the 7th Street façade of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on September 26, 2026. The outdoor project will remain on view through February 28, 2027, marking the Los Angeles-based artist’s first institutional solo presentation.
The mural expands Walsh’s ongoing exploration of queer and trans connection, intimacy, and possibility across urban and natural landscapes. According to ICA LA, the work draws on queer archives, Los Angeles ecologies, topographic maps, and photographs of the artist’s community staged in their garden. These sources are recomposed into an image of landscape as a site for connection and belonging.
Walsh’s practice extends painting beyond the conventional limits of canvas and paint. Their process incorporates digital modeling, hand-weeded stencils, and screen printing, producing scenes of silhouetted bodies situated in nature and spaces of pleasure. Gardens, parks, and urban environments recur in the artist’s work as settings for queer intimacy and as landscapes reclaimed in response to systemic erasure.
The imagery for ‘Gathering’ brings archival and geographic material into contact with embodied experience. Walsh combines found images with photographs from their own community, transforming references that are “stamped in time,” in ICA LA’s description, into visions of queer and trans connection. The new mural will extend these formal and conceptual concerns while focusing particularly on the ecologies of Los Angeles.
Walsh was born in Washington, D.C., in 1989 and lives and works in Los Angeles. They hold an MFA from Yale University and a BA from Occidental College. Their solo and two-person exhibitions have included presentations at Vielmetter in Los Angeles, Yossi Milo in New York, M+B Gallery in Los Angeles, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, and Fondation des États-Unis in Paris. Their work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Night Gallery, Abrons Art Center, and other venues.
‘Gathering’ is part of ICA LA’s fall 2026 season, which also includes exhibitions by Los Angeles artists Carl Cheng and Amia Yokoyama, alongside a youth project developed through the museum’s Agency of Assets program. ICA LA is located at 1717 East 7th Street in Los Angeles, and admission is always free.
