Jarl Mohn, former CEO of NPR and chairman of E! Entertainment Television, has made a major gift of contemporary Los Angeles artwork to the city's Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The three institutions will jointly own and manage the collection of 260 works of art. The gift comes from the extensive art collection owned by Mohn and his wife, Pamela Mohn.
Jarl Mohn served as CEO of NPR from 2014 to 2019. He also ran E! during the cable television's explosive growth years, from 1990 to 1998.
The Mohn Collection has been extensively assembled over the past nineteen years. It includes paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works by Los Angeles-based artists. In addition to the donation, Mohn will establish an endowment for annual purchases as well as expenses related to the ongoing care and storage of the collection.
The joint effort by the three museums has been dubbed “The Mohn Art Collection: Hammer, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, or MAC3” for short. In addition to the Mohn family gift, the Hammer Museum plans to enhance the MAC3 collection with 80 works that the museum has previously acquired through the Made in LA Biennial since 2012. Curators from the three institutions met to make the first joint acquisitions for the collection, unanimously selecting 16 works from Made in LA 2023: Life Works. In total, the MAC3 collection now totals 356 works.
The jointly owned collection “establishes a pioneering model of institutional collaboration and commitment to directly supporting Los Angeles’ artist communities. The gift will enable the three institutions to actively and collectively acquire works by Los Angeles artists on an annual basis, with acquisitions jointly selected by the three museums’ curatorial teams. Every two years, these acquisitions will come directly from future editions of the Hammer Museum’s Made in Los Angeles exhibition. During alternating non-biennial years, curators from the three institutions will work together to identify acquisitions through studio visits, exhibitions, and more to inform their ongoing discussions. The full collection will be available to each institution for viewing and will prioritize a loan program to encourage the works to be displayed in other museums around the world,” the museum troika explained in announcing Mohn’s gift.
Mohn’s current collection includes works by more than 125 Los Angeles-based artists, including several who have appeared in one of the six editions of Made in L.A. to date, such as Aria Dean, Rafa Esparza, Lauren Halsey, Luchita Hurtado, Arthur Jafa, Silke Otto-Knapp, Analia Sabin, Martine Sims, and Candace Williams. Some of the donated art collection is said to be pop culture-friendly, with works by artists beyond those included in previous exhibitions, including important works by Caron Davis, Mark Grotjahn, Rodney McMillian, Colin Smith, and others.
(Pictured: “Bloods II,” a 2020 work by Arthur Jafa, included in the Mohns Family Gift.)
