Los Angeles Nomadic Division is pleased to announce the four artists selected to receive 2024 Mohn Land Grants: Carlos Agredano, Lizette Hernandez, Vincent Enrique Hernandez and Daid Roy. 

Mohn LAND Grants were introduced in 2023 as a new and ambitious initiative to invest in emerging Los Angeles artists by providing them with a platform to present site-responsive, transdisciplinary work across Los Angeles County. The program was developed in collaboration with art collectors and philanthropists Pamela and Jarl Mohn. For its second year, the Mohn family has increased their support to realize new work at sites across Los Angeles.

Artists were selected by a curatorial committee at LAND—comprised of director Laura Hyatt, and curators-at-large Bryan Barcena and Irina Gusin—and based on a criteria of artistic excellence, a depth of community engagement, and the potential of the support to elevate each artist’s career and overall practice. 

According to the curatorial team “this year’s cohort of Mohn LAND Grantees were selected because their methodologies represent new ways of working through conceptual and aesthetic concerns, while also creating profound connections to the city around them.

There is a hopeful aspect to these proposals, a radical grafting of artistic consideration onto existing habits and routines, and one that suggests an expanded conception of what defines the role of the artist. This will be reflected in the siting of these works, as these projects look to locations already familiar to these artists, such as soccer fields, public parks and freeway underpasses for intervention. Moreover, the proposed projects engage with LAND’s mission, one that facilitates the creation of site-responsive artworks available free of charge and open to the public.”

2024 Mohn LAND Grant Recipients

Carlos Agredano (b. 1998, Los Angeles, CA) uses readymade and process-based artworks to address the inequalities produced by discriminatory urban planning and environmental racism. In his research practice, Agredano interrogates how policies like redlining and private racially restrictive covenants enabled freeway construction and manufactured air pollution disparities in racially diverse, low-income neighborhoods. His artworks visually reveal the often-subtle effects of urban disparity across Los Angeles. These take the form of paintings that record the cumulative buildup of pollutants and smog on their surfaces, or as found objects such as dust-caked window air conditioners, and sun-faded umbrellas used by street vendors.

Lizette Hernandez (b. 1992 in Los Angeles, California) is a first-generation Mexican-American artist primarily working in sculpture. Through a collaboration with clay, she is led by listening to the landscape and investigates expressions of inheritance and regeneration. Hernández explores concepts around “the sacred” and the ideology of deep ecology by highlighting the intersections of floral anatomies, religious iconography and ritual practices of remembrance. Her process welcomes experimentation by use of plant matter with Raku firing and fusing other elements such as recycled glass.

Vincent Enrique Hernandez (b. 1998, Los Angeles) is an artist working in Los Angeles whose practice engages with history, monuments, localism, and community by appropriating narratives related to regional culture. Hernandez’s work is grounded in numerous research processes: deep internet dives, picking apart articles, archives, advertisements, visiting libraries, and casual conversation. He is drawn to stories and storytelling as a method and subject, and feels that maintaining oral traditions is a central tenet to his practice, and specifically focuses on these as the catalyst for the construction of local mythologies.

Daid Roy a.k.a. Daid Puppypaws (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working in sculpture, photography, video, music, technology, and performance. Roy is guided by the belief that art is a practice of freedom that should never be estranged from everyday life. Indeed, their practice is often difficult to distinguish from the kinds of labor we associate with that of a scientist, researcher, hobbyist, or even auto mechanic. The form of Roy’s sculpture are functional, high-powered model rockets, which the artist constructs, presents as artworks, and launches. In 2016, Roy began their BLACKNASA project, that aims to “reclaim the power of technology as a tool for good – rockets for peaceful purposes only.” BLACKNASA’s mission statement is as follows: “To conduct rocket science, both technical and social; To promote the Seven Noble Ideals of Human Space Exploration: Creativity, Challenge, Courage, Ingenuity, Perseverance, Unity, and Discovery”. This multidisciplinary project reorients the education and dissemination of information regarding space exploration, rocketry, and technology towards peaceful aims. Under the aegis of BLACKNASA, Roy also composes experimental music, and holds educational workshops.