Made in L.A. 2012, the Hammer’s first large-scale biennial, officially closed September 2, but if you missed the exhibition you are not entirely out of luck. Certain installations will remain up as we prepare for the installation of our upcoming exhibitions: A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s Salome (opening September 16), Graphic Design: Now in Production and Zarina: Paper Like Skin (both opening September 30).

Pearl C. Hsiung’s work, From Above It Is Not Bright, From Below It Is Not Dark, located on Lindebrook Terrace will remain up through September 9, as will Mark Hagen’s piece, To Be Titled (Additive Sculpture , Los Angeles Screen) located in front of the marble staircase on the courtyard level.  Also open through September 9 is David Synder’s work Me TV Located in Gallery 6.

Koki Tanaka’s Beholding Performer, Performing Beholder in the Lobby Gallery will remain open through September 16. 

Morgan Fisher’s work, Blue Green Red Yellow will remain up through the end of 2012.

And finally, Meg Cranston’s Lobby wall murals, California and Fireplace 12 will remain up through February 7, 2013.

(Captions Top to Bottom, Left to Right: Pearl C. Hsiung From Above It Is Not Bright, From Below It Is Not Dark, Mark Hagen To Be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Los Angeles Screen), David Synder Me TV, Koki Tanaka Beholding Performer, Performing Beholder, Morgan Fisher Blue Green Red Yellow, Meg Cranston California, Fireplace 12. All part of Made in L.A. 2012 Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 2-September 2, 2012. Photography by Brian Forrest.)

-Miriam Newcomer, Communications Fellow.

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists

A professional jury and the public selected the recipient of the award

Los Angeles—The Hammer Museum has announced that Meleko Mokgosi (Born 1981 in Gaborone, Botswana; lives and works in Culver City) is the recipient of the inaugural Mohn Award. A recent UCLA grad (MFA ’11), Mokgosi’s monumental painting on view at the Hammer is provocative, deeply political, and grapples with the complexities of post-colonial Africa and issues of representation. Funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, the $100,000 award will be granted over two years to Mokgosi and will be accompanied by the publication of a monograph about his work. While a jury of professional curators selected five finalists from among the 60 artists in the exhibition Made in L.A. 2012, the Mohn Award recipient was chosen by visitors to the exhibition through online and on-site voting. Public voting began on June 28 and ended August 12. The public was asked to choose their favorite artist from the five jury-selected finalists.

FIVE FINALISTS FOR THE MOHN AWARD:

• Simone Forti (Born 1935 in Florence, Italy; lives and works in Westwood) Work on view at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park and performances scheduled at both the Hammer and Barnsdall in August.

• Liz Glynn (Born 1981 in Boston, MA; lives and works in Chinatown) Work on view at the Hammer Museum.

• Meleko Mokgosi (Born 1981 in Gaborone, Botswana; lives and works in Culver City) Work on view at the Hammer Museum.

• Slanguage (Karla Diaz born 1976 in Los Angeles & Mario Ybarra Jr. born 1973 in Los Angeles; both live and work in Wilmington) Programs throughout the summer and work on view at LA><ART.

•Erika Vogt (Born 1973 in East Newark, New Jersey; lives and works in Highland Park) Work on view at the Hammer Museum.

THE MOHN AWARD JURY:

• Cecilia Alemani, curator and director of High Line Art Program

• Doryun Chong, associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art

• Rita Gonzalez, curator of contemporary art at LACMA

• Anthony Huberman, independent curator and writer

DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE & IMAGES

About the Artist

Meleko Mokgosi uses painting to interrogate the limits of representation, the politics of abstraction, and the dynamics created when viewing representational canvases on institutional gallery walls. The artist’s technical acuity delivers a kind of critical visuality, asking viewers to draw out affinities between experiencing and interpreting. The work on view at the Hammer is part of a larger series dealing with post-colonial Africa. Pax Kaffraria: Sikhuselo Sembumbulu (2012) addresses the question of nationalism in relation to globalization and resistance. The work meditates on sikhuselo sembumbulu, a Xhosa term meaning “bulletproof.” This is a reference to the Xhosa cattle killings of 1856–57, which were intended to drive away colonial powers and simultaneously resurrect ancestors. The series of paintings frames the historic event and considers a legacy of resistance that continues today—namely, the persistent drive to become bulletproof. At the same time this history is represented as only partially available to viewers, suggesting the difficulty of cultural translation.

Captions, top-bottom: Meleko Mokgosi. Pax Kaffraria: Sikhuselo Sembumbulu, 2012. Oil on canvas. 96 x 584 in. (243.8 x 1483.4 cm). Made in L.A. 2012 Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 2-September 2, 2012. Photo by Brian Forrest; Meleko Mokgosi portrait by Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists

Made in L.A. artist Kathryn Andrews discusses how working with fabricators influences the final product.

Filed under: Behind the Scenes, Made in L.A. Artists, Video

Artist Fiona Connor at the photocopier in the Hammer Museum Lobby. Photo by Marianne Williams.

The following is an interview conducted by the Hammer Museum’s new media associate Amanda Law with Made in L.A. artist Fiona Connor regarding her project Lobbies on Wilshire Publishing House. From June 28 – July 12 Connor worked with a host of collaborators to activate her installation by organizing a workshop and publishing house to create an alternate catalogue for Made in L.A. 2012. During this time Connor generated content by collecting documentation and reaction to the exhibition and events from invited guests and museum visitors. Articles were printed using a photocopying machine installed in the lobby and distributed daily.

Amanda: How long have you been working in the lobby now?

Fiona: I’ve been here for two weeks.

Photo by Salonee Bhaman.

A: What were you responding to in terms of creating this publication?

F: Um. That’s a good question. I think it came—That’s a really good question.

A: Was it a long journey to this point?

F: Yeah, such a long journey.

A: Did it start with the stairs, or…

F: No, it started with coming into—being invited to respond to a lobby, and the idea of making the lobby more lobby than it already was. And through this clogging, all that multiplicity, how would it change the way we acted within it? Part of that proposal was to take all the printers from the whole building and relocate then in the lobby. I’m interested in how upstairs, in the admin offices, there’s all this printing and production that goes on, but there’s no visibility, so taking that site of production and transferring it to the lobby—so that every time somebody prints something from admin, they would come downstairs and gather their printing.

Photo by Marianne Williams.

A: So people are actually doing that?

F: No, that got kaboshed. So at the same time that I was developing that proposal, we were developing these shows where I was trying to collapse the documentation of a site specific installation with the installation itself, because it’s like a problem of doing installation – can these works travel? Like they can’t transcend time and space. Which is a really important value, or something that people ask of art to do. So, I thought if the publication gets generated and produced in the space, it’ll be more close than doing this more conservative documentation that doesn’t question how work is documented. So saying a catalogue is another type of architecture of an exhibition, but then that architecture moves past the parameters of the show. What if you put as much rigor and thought into the documentation as the work itself – so acknowledging it as a new site.

A: So say I’m a visitor to the museum, and I walk up to your setup–would you interact with me?

F: Definitely.

A: What would you say to me?

F: The most important part of the work is that it gives a platform for visitors to – for their voice to be inserted, historicized, cataloged. I’ll basically tell you it’s an alternative catalog, and you can take as many as you want, and it would be great to get a response. And that conversation can go as far as you want, to the point of like, someone who comes and stays the whole day with us. It’s a very messy open project and I think the only rule is that all of the content is generated within close proximity to the exhibition, which is the point of departure from a lot of catalogs, which are produced before the exhibition. So there are the opinions of Jarl Mohn, and then there’s the voice of the artists, voice of the visitors, and voices of the curators. They’re all collapsed together in this one document.

Photo by Marianne Williams.

A: When can we pick up a catalog?

F: They are going to be placed in libraries in LA. And also it’s going to be scanned into a giant PDF. I’m not sure where that will be available yet, but maybe it’ll be a website where it’ll just be a click to download it.

A: What have you noticed by being in the lobby every day?

F: It’s actually amazing how productive it’s been. If you have a table and a computer and a power plug, you can just really settle. We’ve been really focused.

A: How has the technology worked for you? Have there been any crashes?

F: No, we’ve been good. Just the usual jams.

Photo by Marianne Williams.

A: Working at the museum, I love coming through this space now. I’m not a huge fan of this lobby space, but having somebody inhabit the space that’s not normally inhabited makes it much more human.

F: Hopefully! These guys have been working so hard.

A: It looks like it. You want to give an oral shout out to…

F: Yeah, definitely! Emi, and Salonee, and Ana, and Alex, and Elizabeth Cline’s been…it’s been a really intense conversation, because we’ve both been pushing our boundaries heaps, there’s been a lot experimentation for both of us. You know? I reckon like, I got a feeling that it was a leap of faith.

A: That’s cool.

F: Yeah, it is cool.

July 13, 2012
Hammer Museum

Filed under: Behind the Scenes, Made in L.A. Artists

PRESS RELEASE: PUBLIC BILLBOARDS BY MADE IN L.A. ARTISTS ON VIEW ACROSS L.A. | FEATURING ROY DOWELL, DASHIELL MANLEY, AND NICOLE MILLER

Roy Dowell, 2012, site-specific public billboard, courtesy of the artist and LAXART, Los Angeles

Made in L.A. 2012 artists Roy Dowell, Dashiell Manley, and Nicole Miller present public billboards on the occasion of the first Los Angeles biennial.

Since the late 1980s, Roy Dowell has embraced collage, reasserting its important role in the development of modernism. His works suggest that beauty can exist in the base materials of mass culture. While best known for two-dimensional works, Dowell has brought his sensibility into three dimensions with the group of sculptures currently on view at the Hammer Museum – they are modest in scale, full of vibrant presence, and embedded with a complex of references. Reminding us of another important modernist development, the incorporation of extra-European forms, the sculptures respond to colloquial and ceremonial objects that Dowell has found in his travels and research. Dowell’s billboard also incorporates many of the visual references found in these objects.

Roy Dowell’s public billboard on La Cienega Boulevard is produced by LA><ART Public Art Initiatives and ForYourArt – Los Angeles Public Domain (LAPD), and will be up through the end of July 2012.

Dashiell Manley, 2012, site-specific public billboard, courtesy of the artist and LAXART, Los Angeles

Dashiell Manley has a new body of work featured at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park. Manley’s work actively resists classification—in fact, it compulsively avoids it—not by negation but by abundance. He makes sculptures, paintings, videos, performances, animations, and photographs. In many instances he employs all these mediums in a single work, transforming a material and reconstituting it by subjecting it to a series of applied or circumstantial aesthetic assaults. The history of painting and the pressures of object making are forces that Manley reacts to viscerally.

Dashiell Manley’s first public project in Los Angeles is a billboard on Sunset Boulevard at Olive Street above the House of Blues produced by LA><ART Public Art Initiatives and ForYourArt – Los Angeles Public Domain (LAPD) – in conjunction with the City of West Hollywood’s Art on the Outside program and CBS Outdoor.

Nicole Miller, 2012, site-specific public billboard, courtesy of the artist and LAXART, Los Angeles

Nicole Miller’s billboard depicts a document from actor Darby Jones’ archive that Miller was able to obtain through her work with actor’s son. Jones, one of the first African American actors to work in Hollywood, kept lists of directors or famed actors that he wanted to work with during his career. These lists are both an anecdotal and biographical record of an African American actor’s career at a time when minorities within this profession were limited to playing stereotypical characters. Nicole Miller’s billboard directly corresponds to her new body of video work on view at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park.

Miller’s billboard is located on Hollywood Boulevard (between Edgemont and Berendo Streets) at the entrance to Barnsdall Art Park until August 18, 2012, and is produced by LA><ART Public Art Initiatives and ForYourArt – Los Angeles Public Domain (LAPD).

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists

Made in L.A. Soundmap is a companion app to Made in L.A. 2012. Soundmap explores Los Angeles as context for the exhibition through interviews with Made in L.A. artists and curators, providing visitors with insights into art making in Los Angeles today. Click here to download the app.

In response to many requests for a sampling of the audio segments on the Made in L.A. Soundmap app, we bring you just that!

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists, Soundmap

This past Friday, June 22, Made in L.A. artists Scott Benzel and Math Bass both held performances at the Hammer.

The reel-to-reel tape for Scott Benzel’s (Threnody) A Beginner’s Guide to Mao Tse-tung—for 2 tape loops, dancers, cello, viola, violin and percussion was set up in the courtyard, and remained there for an encore performance after Math Bass’s Brutal Set. Melinda Rice (viola), Eric KM Clark (violin), and Devin Hoff (bass) began Benzel’s Threnody, which was inspired by a 1967 Esquire article featuring a scantily clad Sharon Tate and portions of Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. Benzel’s costumes and props included a pitchfork, tube lights, arrows, and a Coke bottle wielded by dancers costumed in the style of Tate as she illustrated tenents of Mao’s writings for Esquire. The first performance of Threnody was set as the sun set.

After Benzel’s performance, I found the Esquire article Threnody engages with and comments on. After having looked at the article, I’m particularly interested to see Benzel’s performance once again on June 28, during the Hammer Bash.

Immediately after Benzel’s first performance, the audience crowded in for Math Bass’s Brutal Set. I was curious about what Bass’s performance would look like—I was able to take some pictures of the set during rehearsal, but was unsure of what the cinderblocks, ladders, and potted plants would be transformed into during her performance. I experienced a bit of a dilemma during Brutal Set: taking pictures felt like it may disrupt the pretty intense atmosphere created by performers within that space.

I settled for just a few until the cast came out for their final bow.

-Salonee Bhaman, Getty Intern

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists

The five finalists for the Mohn Award are Simone Forti, Liz Glynn, Meleko Mokgosi, Slanguage, and Erika Vogt.  The $100,000 award will be granted over two years to one artist from the exhibition Made in L.A. 2012 and will be accompanied by the publication of a book on the finalist’s work.  Funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, a jury of four professional curators selected the five finalists from among the 60 artists in the exhibition.

The Mohn Award Jury was comprised of Cecilia Alemani (curator and director of High Line Art Program), Doryun Chong (associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art), Rita Gonzalez (curator of contemporary art at LACMA), and Anthony Huberman (independent curator and writer).  They issued this statement:

“Each of the five artists selected presented ambitious projects that intrigue the viewer and offer a compelling example of the concerns and working methods that inform and drive their art-making. Their installations and performances showcased in Made in L.A. 2012 demonstrate the ways in which these artists are pushing the boundaries of their respective mediums, activating the gallery in thoughtful ways, and sometimes even going beyond it through performances, workshops, and other means of engagement. Beyond their strong contributions to the exhibition, we feel confident that these artists will continue to contribute to the field and participate meaningfully in the conversations and debates that characterize contemporary art practices well into the future. While the selection process was completely open, we are pleased that this selection of artists exemplifies the range of materials, ethnicities, gender, and age represented in the overall exhibition. Because we appreciate the efforts of all the artists in the exhibition, this was a tough decision to reach and one that required much discussion and debate. We offer our congratulations to the finalists.”

The Mohn Award recipient will be chosen by visitors to the exhibition. Public voting begins today, June 28 at 12pm. We ask the public to choose their favorite artist from the above-mentioned finalists.

Visitors to Made in L.A. 2012 may register to vote on-site at all three exhibition venues (Hammer Museum, LA><ART, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery) and may only vote once they are registered. A photo ID is required. Once registered, a voter may cast his or her vote on-site or online.

Voting begins Thursday, June 28, at 12pm PST and ends on Sunday, August 12 at 11:59PM PST. The finalist will be announced soon after.

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists

Made in L.A. artist Sarah Cain invited us to join her in one of her favorite places, The Huntington Gardens on a quiet Monday morning.

Run time: 1 min., 51 sec.

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists, Video

Artist Joel Otterson invited us to his studio in Lincoln Heights. In this video he discusses decorative arts and shows us the work that is in the Made in L.A. exhibition, which can be seen at the Hammer Museum.

Run time: 4 min, 45 sec.

Filed under: Made in L.A. Artists, Video