For Los Angeles' intellectual community, the end of the Cold War paled in emotional resonance compared to the visceral traumas of the early 1990s: the AIDS crisis’ devastating toll, the brutal police beating of Rodney King sparking the 1992 riots, and the First Gulf War (1991) igniting widespread anti-war protests. However, the most prominent feature of Los Angeles’ art scene was not its thematic messaging, but rather its stylistic fragmentation, manifesting in a kaleidoscopic array of creative expressions that defied singular categorization. The chaotic exhibition "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" (1992), curated by Paul Schimmel at MOCA, was prescient. And its subversive focus on antisocial behavior captured the city’s social dislocations and tensions.

The proliferation of art spaces certainly certainly helped artists to explore diverse pathways to individual expression. For example, Santa Monica's Bergamot Station, designed by Lawrence Scarpa, housing several art galleries, opened in September 1994. That's where Tim Blum and Jeff Poe opened their gallery Blum & Poe, Marc Foxx opened his gallery, and Robert Gunderman and Randy Sommer opened ACME. In 1994 Peter Noever, director of the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Austria, opened the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in the Rudolph Schindler houses that were by then historical landmarks of Hollywood.

The lack of a center of mass was particularly evident in painting, which, more than ever, defied cohesive stylistic or ideological unity.

Lawrence Gipe (Otis class of 1986) appropriated the images of archival black-and-white photographs and posters and turned them into expressionist paintings, notably the series titled "The Krupp Project" (1990).

The Pomona-born Kim Dingle (a 1990 graduate of Claremont Graduate School) toyed with different painting styles, from the Neo-expressionist "Black Girl Dragging White Girl" (1992) to the Cubistic "Girlica" (2018), her reinterpretation of Picasso's "Guernica", via “Home Depot Coloring Books - Anyone Can Do This” (2017), a series of dense and intricate abstract paintings.

Laura Owens, who had graduated from CalArts in 1994, became in 2003 the youngest artist ever to be given a retrospective at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. All her paintings were untitled. She employed drop shadows to create trompe l’oeil effects (like in the 1997 untitled of birds in a blue sky). She imitated classic Chinese painting in the untitled creek amid dead trees under a cloudy sky of 2002 and the untitled lone tree of 2003. Her more figurative paintings could be metaphysical, like the two kissing youngsters of a 2003 untitled, with the spherical Earth in the background.

The mission of Lowbrow Art and Pop Surrealism was continued by Mark Ryden (who had graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1987), with paintings such as "The Birth" (1994) and "Rosie’s Tea Party" (2005), and by Los Angeles native Gary Baseman (who had graduated from UCLA and worked as an illustrator in New York), with cartoonish paintings such as "Dumb Luck and Other Paintings About Lack of Control" (1999).

The Texas-born painter Carmen Lomas-Garza, who graduated in 1981 from San Francisco State University, documented Latino family life in paintings such as "Lala and Tudi's Birthday Party" (1991).

The boundaries between Conceptual Art, assemblage, sculpture, and installation dissolved into unprecedented fluidity, creating a dynamic interplay of methods and materials.

Chicana artist Nao Bustamante created the character of "Rosa" the exhibitionist in the performance "Rosa Does Joan In" (1992).

Patssi Valdez of Asco fame made large-scale site-specific altar-like multimedia installations (1990-96).

Former muralist John Valadez turned to photocollages such as "Mujeres Malas" (2018) and surrealistic beach paintings such as "Chaos" (2024).

Charles Ray, who was raised in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles in 1981, was a master of distorted realism, as shown in “Family Romance” (1993), four mannequins in fiberglass, and in “Reclining Woman” (2018), of stainless steel.

Joel Otterson, a Los Angeles native who moved to New York but returned in 2002, made assemblages that were also furniture like the “Dead Rock Star Dinner Plates” (1992), "The Wall of China Made in America - The Peaceable Kingdom" (1996), constructed of plumbing pipes and pottery, the chandeliers of 2014, out of second-hand glassware and the hanging "The Last Judgment", a collage of found materials (ceramic beads, glass, stone, plastic, coral, wood, steel, copper, bronze, etc) that took ten years to complete (2014-24).

Tim Hawkinson, born in San Francisco and graduated from UCLA in 1989, started out with large-scale graphite drawings such as "Wall Chart of World History from Earliest Times to the Present" (1997) but then specialized in kinetic sculptures such as "Ueberorgan" (2000), a stadium-size automated bagpipe, and "Emoter" (2002), a large photographic collage of the artist’s own face animated by a machine via almost 60 meters of wires.

Santa Monica native Cheryl Ann Thomas, who studied at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, specialized in abstract ceramic sculptures made of coiled ropes of porcelain, like the series "Relics" (2002-04).

The British-born Stephen Holman relocated to Los Angeles in 1987 and co-founded the performance ensemble Theatre Carnivale in 1987 that performed Dadaistic shows such as "The Grandeur of Falsehood, The Vengeance of Squid" (1991), featuring sound machines by Matt Heckert.

The Chinese-born Hung Liu, who had graduated in 1986 from UC San Diego, made conceptual installation such as "Jiu Jin Shan/ Old Gold Mountain" (1994).

Nancy Rubins' assemblages got more ambitious and imposing: "Trailers and Hot Water Heaters" (1992) for curator Paul Schimmel’s exhibition “Helter Skelter" was a pile of water heaters, and "Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s "Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space" (2002) was what the title says.

The Greek-born Annetta Kapon, who moved to Los Angeles in 1980 (UCLA class of 1992), created "Floor Scale" (1991), a readymade installation that invited the viewers to step on it: a whole floor covered with old-fashioned square bathroom scales that created a perfect grid and turned the room into an interactive mechanical object.

Digital (computer) technology transformed artistic practices, leading to a proliferation of computer-based (and soon Internet-based) often interactive audiovisual installations.

Paul McCarthy was still busy arousing physical and psychological revulsion, but he became a star with depraved labyrinthine installations such as: “Cultural Gothic” (1992), an installation of fiberglass animatronic sculptures; “The Garden” (1992), a thicket in which two animatronic male mannequins copulate, respectively, with a tree and with the ground; "WS White Snow" (2013), an 800-square-meter artificial forest containing a faithful replica of the Utah home of the artist’s childhood (plus 47 hours of video); “NV Night Vater” (2017), a giant set of rooms inspired by Liliana Cavani's film "The Night Porter" (1974); etc. No less successful were his abominable sculptures: the inflatable 35-meter-high "Blockhead" (2003), "Pig Island" (2003), the inflatable 17-meter-high "Complex Shit" (2008), as well as the "White Snow" series of computer-designed and machine-carved walnut sculptures (“White Snow Dopey Dopey Head”, 2013; “White Snow and Prince on Horseback - Merger Transformation Mutation”, 2016).

Christian Ristow, who emerged from the Survival Research Laboratories in San Francisco, launched his robot performance art in 1997 in Los Angeles.

Victoria Vesna, who was hired in 1992 at UC Santa Barbara, made pioneering net-art piece like "Bodies INCorporated" (1994).

The exhibition "Art in the Streets" (2011), curated by Jeffrey Deitch at the Museum of Contemporary Art, was the first major museum survey of graffiti and street art and signaled that street art had become a major form of art in Los Angeles. Los Angeles' graffiti and mural artists quickly emerged from the underground to become mainstream. They signed and carefully documented their murals. The city protected them instead of harassing them. It wasn't an underground movement anymore. Some of them even transitioned to museum and gallery life. Thematically, they were significantly different from their East Coast counterparts. While graffiti in New York and other cities was closely related to hip-hop music, graffiti artists in Los Angeles descended from the socialist and frequently Chicano and sometimes punk muralists of the 1970s. Famous street artists included: David Choe, raised in Koreatown, who made his first graffiti in 1990, didn't complete his degree at California College of the Arts, drew the graphic novel "Slow Jam" (1999), and became rich and famous when, hired in 2004-05 to paint murals at the Silicon Valley headquarters of the startup Facebook, asked to be paid in stock which was soon worth a fortune; Mister Cartoon, aka Los Angeles native Mark Machado, originally known as Flame when he was part of the WCA crew (from 1987), who contributed "LA Confidential" to MOCA's 2011 exhibition, and later became more famous as a tattoo artist (he tattoed famous rappers); David Flores, a skateboarding illustrator who made mosaic-like murals such as "Madiba" (2013); Venice-raised Christina Angelina, maker of hyper-realistic murals such as "Redemption of the Angels" (2013), a collaboration with world-famous Irish muralist Finbarr Notte (aka Fin DAC), and "The Face of Reno" (2015); WRDSMTH, who moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and became famous with his murals of typewriters and inspirational text like "Aspire to Inspire" (2016); Hollywood native Tristan Eaton, who studied in New York but returned to Los Angeles in 2013 and painted the mural "I was a Botox Junkie" (2013); Kelly "Risk" Graval, who moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles as a teenager, and merged mural art with assemblage, like in "Face Your Fears" (2018), a giant metal shark made of license plates (a riff on a famous Damien Hirst piece); the collective Earth Crew 2000 (formed in 1989 by Helen Samuels) that made “Undiscovered America”; Shepard Fairey, a skate punk who had designed the sticker known as "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" in 1989 while attending the Rhode Island School of Design, who moved to San Diego in 1996 and then to Los Angeles where he made murals, peaking with "Peace Elephant" (2011); Chris Chanyang Shim (aka Royyal Dog), who painted “Peace To You” (2017); How & Nosm (twin brothers Raoul and Davide Perre'), who made the abstract “Heartship”; and Judithe Hernandez, who had moved to Chicago in 1980, returned to Los Angeles in 2010 and in 2019 painted the seven-story mural "La Nueva Reina de Los Ángeles".

In 2003 art collector Ed Sweeney started collecting graffiti art.

Many of these muralists became international stars. El Mac (Los Angeles native Miles MacGregor) started in 1999 to paint photorealistic portraits via a striation shading technique of Latino Laborers such as "Our Lady of Aalborg" (2013) in Denmark and "Spirit Without Borders" (2014) in El Paso, and later more philosophical portraits like "To the Future" (2014) in Toronto and "Ars et Scientia" (2015) in Boston, besides collaborating with Retna on murals like "Of Our Youth" in Los Angeles (2010).

Retna (Marquis Lewis, born and raised in Los Angeles), the most prominent members of the AWR (Art Works Rebels) crew, filled his large-scale murals with geometric hieroglyphic scripts of his invention, inspired by Egyptian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic and Mayan glyphs, messages written in a secret code and elegant calligraphy that nobody can read (like the "Black & Gold" mural and the "Silver" mural).

Photography ended the century on a more private note, emphasizing personal narratives over glamour.

An influential educator was Allan Sekula, who started teaching at CalArts in 1985 and revitalized conceptual documentary photography with series such as "Fish Story" (1989–95). Another influential educator, Mark Steinmetz, took in the 1990s most of the evocative black-and-white pictures of ordinary life that ended up in "Angel City West" (2015).

East Los Angeles native self-taught Gregory Bojorquez captured Chicano life in the series "Eastsiders" (1995-2000).

Lesbian photographer Catherine Opie (CalArts class of 1988) photographed her moustached male alter-ego “Bo” in the series "Being and Having" (1991) and paid tribute to queer culture in her self-portraits, for example "Self Portrait/ Pervert" (1994), half naked, her head covered with a bondage hood, her arms pierced with needles, and the word “pervert” carved into her chest.

Chicana lesbian photographer Laura Aguilar, born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley and mostly self-taught, made several series of nude self-portraits in nature, indifferent to how her fat body contrasted with the traditional model's body, for example "Nature Self-Portrait #12" (1996) and "Motion #58" (1999).

Video artists (mentored by venues like LACE and MOCA) blurred the lines between documentary, performance and conceptual installation while harnessing new digital technologies to critique racial inequities and urban alienation.

Diana Thater, born in San Francisco and a graduate of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design in 1990, created disorienting video projections of natural environments like "Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden" (1992) and "Delphine" (1999).

Doug Aitken, born in Redondo Beach, another graduate of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design (class of 1991), created the multi-screen video installation "Electric Earth" (1999) and projected "Song 1" (2012) on the convex exterior of a circular museum (turning it into a 360-degree screen) so that viewers had to walk around the building to watch the video.

Bill Viola remained one of the most influential video artists. The "Quintet" series (2000-2001) and the "Passions" series (2000-03) employed a virtuoso slow-motion technique to mimic painting styles of the Rinascimento. The "Tristan Project" (2004), employing the same extreme slow-motion method, was projected during the performance of Wagner's opera "Tristan und Isolde".

John Kricfalusi, a Canadian animator who had moved to Los Angeles in 1978, created "Weekend Pussy Hunt" (1996), billed "the world's first interactive web-based cartoon".

The great foreign filmmakers didn't emigrate to Hollywood anymore. Hollywood had to rely on US-born talents only, and that pool was much smaller. The decade opened with elegant revisions of classic genres, like Jerry Zucker's romantic ghost story "Ghost" (1990) and Ridley Scott's road movie "Thelma and Louise" (1991). The major talent to emerge was Quentin Tarantino, a purveyor of hyper-violent cinema in films such as "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and "Pulp Fiction" (1994), and who also scripted Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" (1994).

Violence was indeed a main feature of the 1990s: Abel Ferrara's " King of New York" (1990), David Fincher's "Seven" (1995), Martin Scorsese's "Casino" (1995), David Cronenberg's "Crash" (1996), and Curtis Hanson's "L.A. Confidential" (1997) were emblematic. But there was also an undercurrent of purely atmospheric cinema, best represented by David Lynch's cryptic art, that peaked with "Lost Highway" (1997) and "Mulholland Drive" (2001), and also by Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man" (1995) and Mike Figgis' "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995).

Another master of crafting atmospheres was Joel Coen, notably in "Barton Fink" (1991) and "Fargo" (1996), both co-created with his brother Ethan.

Some filmmakers pushed the narrative structure to the limit, notably John Sayles in "Men With Guns" (1997), Christopher Nolan in "Memento" (2000), Mike Figgis in "Time Code" (2000), and Marc Forster in "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006).

Wildly creative comedies included: Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump" (1994), Peter Chelsom's "Funny Bones" (1995), Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks" (1996), Joel Coen's "Big Lebowski" (1998), Kevin Smith's "Dogma" (1999), Shane Black's "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" (2005), Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" (2006).

Among screenwriters the genius was Charlie Kaufman who scripted Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" (1999) and Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), and personally directed "Synecdoche New York" (2008)

Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" (1993) mixed computer-generated imagery and live action, and John Lasseter's "Toy Story" (1995) was the first fully computer-animated feature film, the dream of Pixar finally come true. Computer-generated imagery evolved rapidly through films such as Robert Longo's cyberpunk thriller "Johnny Mnemonic" (1995) and Roland Emmerich's sci-fi epic "Independence Day" (1996).

However, Hollywood was no longer the place where great films were made. In the 21st century it became rare for Hollywood to produce films that matched the foreign masters. The notable exceptions were: Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" (2011), John Maringouin's "Ghostbox Cowboy" (2018), Patrick Wang's "A Bread Factory" (2018), Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" (2019), Craig Zobel's "The Hunt" (2020), and Phil Tippett's "Mad God" (2021).

And finally there was literature, now the mostly overlooked "Cinderella" of the arts, overshadowed by the city’s visual and performative avant-garde.

The tradition of the hard-boiled detective novel was continued by Walter Mosley, who set his crime thrillers, such as "Devil in a Blue Dress" (1990), in the Black neighborhood of Watts.

Other important novels of the decade were Jervey Tervalon's "Understanding This" (1994), about Black teenagers growing up in a violent neighborhood, and Janet Fitch's picaresque novel "White Oleander" (1999) about the misadventures of a teenage girl without a family.