Jarl Mohn, former CEO of NPR and head of E! Entertainment Television, has made a significant gift of Los Angeles contemporary art to the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
The collection, which includes 260 works of art, will be jointly owned and managed by the three institutions. The donation comes from the extensive art collection of Mohn and his wife Pamela Mohn.
Jarl Mohn was CEO of NPR from 2014 to 2019. He led the E! Channel during cable television’s rapid growth years from 1990 to 1998.
The Mohn collection was largely assembled over the past 19 years and includes paintings, sculptures and mixed media works by Los Angeles artists. In addition to the donation, the Mohns will establish an endowment for annual purchases as well as the ongoing costs of maintaining and storing the collection.
The joint effort of the three museums was called the Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA, or MAC3 for short. In addition to the Mohns’ gift, the Hammer Museum plans to expand the MAC3 collection with 80 works that the museum has acquired since 2012 as part of its Made in LA biennials. Curators from the three institutions met to make the collection’s first joint purchases and unanimously selected 16 works from “Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living.” In total, the MAC3 collection to date includes 356 artworks.
The jointly owned collection establishes “a groundbreaking model for institutional collaboration and engagement to directly support Los Angeles’ artistic communities. The gift will enable the three institutions to actively and collaboratively acquire works by LA artists on an annual basis, with purchases selected jointly by the curatorial teams of all three museums. Every two years, these purchases will come directly from future editions of the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA Biennial. During the alternating, non-biennial years, curators from the three institutions will work together to identify works for acquisition by visiting studios, exhibitions, and more to inform their ongoing discussions. The entire collection will be available for display at each institution, and a lending program will be prioritized to encourage the exhibition of the works in other museums around the world,” the museum troika explained in announcing the Mohn gift.
The existing Mohn Collection includes works by more than 125 Los Angeles-based artists, including many who have appeared in any of the six editions of Made in LA to date, such as Aria Dean, Rafa Esparza, Lauren Halsey, Luchita Hurtado, Arthur Jafa, Silke Otto-Knapp, Analia Saban, Martine Syms, and Kandis Williams. Some pieces of the donated art collection are intended to be pop culture-focused, with works by artists beyond those included in previous biennials, including important works by artists such as Karon Davis, Mark Grotjahn, Rodney McMillian, Cauleen Smith, and others.
(Pictured: “Bloods II,” a 2020 work by Arthur Jafa included in the Mohns’ donation)
