Housed in a façade stamped with Clare Rojas’s contour painting of a mustachioed man, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery is ever the place for the quirky and the seductive.

Trading in chilly fog for desert heat, Lizabeth Oliveria relocated her gallery from San Francisco to this 2,000-square-foot space in 2004. Since then, under her dark wooden ceiling, Oliveria has showcased the organic-cum-galactic bombast of painter Nick Ackerman, Jen Liu’s four-channel video-installation rich with amethysts and abstraction, and the hand-stitched and hand-dyed cotton quilts of Anna Von Mertens. Oliveria has a deft eye for drawings; group shows, such as the recent "Kinky Sex (Makes the World Go ‘Round)" (based on the Dead Kennedys' song, and featuring the band’s work alongside that of Raymond Pettibon and Barry McGee, among others), reap the benefits. —Melissa Lo