From the southern tip of La Cienega’s gallery row, Anna Helwing charts a constellation of Los Angeles’s emerging art stars.

Don’t let the gallery’s scruffed-up concrete floors fool you: This casual and cozy space is a first-rate outfit. With artists’ binders plump with up-and-comers born or educated right here in Los Angeles, Anna Helwing Gallery is the little Los Angeles gallery that could. Helwing’s preferences range from the neon and pop to the cross-cultural and conceptual, and make for a varied and lively exhibition schedule year-round. Most notably featured in the gallery’s stable: ironic draughtsman Karl Haendel (best known, perhaps, for his pencil-on-paper blow-up of a floating George W. Bush head) and Los Angeles native Mario Ybarra, Jr. who draws humor into violence and works equally well with studded collars and human hair. —Melissa Lo