Reggie Burrows Hodges prefers to disappear. Now his art and music are everywhere in L.A.

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Set us as preferred Reggie Burrows Hodges is only a little worried that the bass will shake his paintings off the gallery walls.“That’s what it’s designed to do,” he said of the traditional dub sound system he had installed at Art + Practice in Leimert Park for his current show “A Theater of Dreams,” which runs through Feb.27.

“We’ve got to get a limiter or something,” he added, laughing, before imagining the visitors who will surely request that the volume be turned down.The collision of music and painting is part of a larger homecoming.Born in Compton in 1965 and now based in the Bay Area, Hodges has exhibited internationally, with work held in the collections of the Met, the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Yet he has never had an institutional solo show in L.A., until now.This week, three exhibitions opened across the city.At the Getty, “A Theater of Passions” riffs on compositions by the 17th century Baroque painters Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia; at the California African American Museum, “A Theater of Miracles” imbues intimate encounters with the high drama of the Old Masters; and “A Theater of Dreams” draws on childhood memories, the city’s Black artistic legacy and Hodges’ travels in Europe.While his paintings now fill galleries, Hodges himself would rather remain out of view.

He rarely grants interviews and declines to be photographed.Once in conversation, however, he is generous and deeply feeling, willing to engage in the messy project of shared meaning-making so long as it’s not the meaning of a particular reference, form or setting.

He wants viewers, he said again and again, to “find a way into the work” without him standing in the way.Asked about music, the artist somewhat reluctantly traces his affinity back to childhood.The youngest o...